Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

I know that this will remain at the bottom of this thread, because it doesn't have enough conspiracy theory in it, but does anyone really think that this is <i>actual vote tampering</i>?<p>I mean, why on earth would you tamper with a voting machine so that it stuffs the ballot, but have it update the UI so that the user can see and report the error? This should fall to the way side of failing basic logic, but it doesn't because people want a sensationalist article to argue over. Changing votes would be much easier to do on the back end, and would have the additional benefit of never being detected by the user

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. If you're in the U.S. I highly reccomend being a poll worker in a contentious district in a swing state if you ever get the chance. I was in a suburb of Denver last election and saw all kinds of shenanigans, from people pulling fire alarms to clear out the polling places to people walking aaround with laptops "checking voter registration" (actually just lying to people to get them to go home).<p>There was also this, a few weeks ago: <a href="http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-arrested-for-destroying-voter-registration-forms/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-ar...</a><p>The fact is that there is a concerted, coordinated effort to tamper with the vote every single election. I have no way of knowing whether this specific incident was malicious, but I sure wouldn't be surprised if it was.

If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time.<p>If enough people cry foul to rule out a large group collectively lying or forgetting their confirmation numbers, fraud would be much easier to establish and localize. Moreover, requiring each independent database of votes to match to within some margin would also decrease the likelihood of fraud by requiring collusion between both organizations.<p>EDIT: Note that the confirmation number would be issued to you anonymously and sans receipt - there would be no way to <i>prove</i> your vote - you could have found some random confirmation number, and no recourse for a single citizen crying foul. The point, rather, is that if several hundred or thousand individuals noticed that their vote seemed to have changed, the likelihood that they were all making it up or forgetting their confirmation numbers would decrease substantially.

The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical.<p>It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.

Voting machines need to be a lot better than this or not exist at all, but does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration? Seems more like a crappy touch screen.

What I've read[1][2] in regard to this incident is that it is most likely a calibration issue: i.e. the touch screen is improperly calibrated and as a result is not selecting the proper region of the screen. Now this is concerning because it likely means other machines could be or are miscalibrated. However the important takeaway here is that this is not some malicious attempt to rig the vote. If that were the case the likely method would be completely invisible from the UI; why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated? Of course, they wouldn't.<p>[1] Joseph Hall comments here, also provides a link to further commentary by him: <a href="http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-reddit-voter-fraud-video" rel="nofollow">http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machines" rel="nofollow">http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machine...</a>

I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine.<p>That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable results.

I wouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by a faulty touch screen. These incidents hurt the trust on the election process, though.<p>The machines used on Brazillian elections are simpler but much better thought out, since it's impossible to input the wrong candidate. You have to input the number of the candidate, review his information and photo, then press "confirm" button. It doesn't present a list of candidates to choose from, so there are no biases. The US should adopt a similar machine. [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazilian_voting_machines" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazili...</a>

I can't fathom why would you even choose touchscreens for voting machines. It's a simple interface, mechanical buttons are much better. They are more durable, offer tactile feedback and can be used by people with visual impairment.

Looks like a calibration issue. They should have included selecting other candidates in the list. While not good enough (voting machines should be "perfect") calling it "altering votes" is a little much. It shows you that it has registered the wrong candidate, I would call this incorrectly registering input.

NBC News confirming they've removed this particular machine because of this:<p><a href="http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-into-one-for-romney/" rel="nofollow">http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...</a>

The system here in Minnesota works much better. All ballots are paper ballots that are indelibly marked by voters. My wife and I voted this morning in our busy precinct in Minnesota, where there are some tight statewide contests about constitutional amendments and perhaps the most contested race for our state's House of Representatives of any electoral district in our state. As usual, we voted by marking bubble-shaped spaces on a paper ballot with a black pen. That provides an excellent audit trail for the voting. Machines can count such paper ballots very rapidly, and they are user-friendly for voters, and there is little ambiguity about how to vote. Minnesota has had ballots like this for at least a decade.<p>But even at that, when a state has a razor-thin margin in an election, it can be maddening to figure out what happened.<p><a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-coleman.html" rel="nofollow">http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-c...</a><p><a href="http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_recount.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_reco...</a><p>The election to the United States Senate from Minnesota in 2008 was too close to call before the election, and even after millions of Minnesotans voted for one of three major party candidates, the margin between the top two candidates, Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman, was so close that the margin was only one-hundredth of 1 percent of the votes cast in the election. That election really underscored the slogan "every vote counts."<p>It's quite indefensible to use a voting system that doesn't leave a literal paper trail. The technology is well proven. But what really gives most election results legitimacy and staying power is a wide enough margin among votes cast by people who show up to vote that the old saying "Vox populi, vox Dei" can apply to the result. The people speak, and even the voters who didn't agree with the plurality have to listen. It's appalling that any state would have a voting system that could obscure what the consensus of the voters is.<p>AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several replies to this comment. Reading other replies posted to this thread since I first wrote this comment, I see several mentions of the systems in the Pacific Northwest states of having mail ballots mailed to voters. When I lived in Taiwan, more than a decade ago, I had a post office box there. Sometimes I would receive postal mail from the United States for the previous holders of that post office box, including State of Oregon ballots for two different Oregon voters (who were presumably each other's roommates while living in Taiwan). I always wondered, without giving into the temptation, whether I could have successfully filled out one (or both?) of those ballots and mailed them back from Taiwan to cast votes in an Oregon election. By contrast, I was never able to cast a Minnesota absentee ballot from Taiwan, even the time when I should have been regarded as having a stable permanent residence address here in the United States. So I missed out on voting in both the 1984 election and the ever-so-controversial election of 2000. I have no clear awareness of how mail ballots are authenticated as having been mailed by the voter to whom they belong (a signature on the envelope?) and hope that someone is checking to prevent those ballots from being misused.

What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question.<p>In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case.<p>How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?

I wish they had also taken video of them selecting Jill Stein to see if the entire machine was calibrated incorrectly or just the Romney/Obama section.

I saw this earlier and I noted that news agencies seemed to be reluctant to post it. CNN has been on this from the jump. I think people are afraid of it being revealed as a fake. There is some serious validation that needs to occur if this is the case.

Citing felipeko: Brazil actually has a very organized election. Aside from bad politicians we have to chose from, the election does not have many problems. We have a judicial system just for election (with judges and clear laws) ready to take actions (and they do take) when something goes wrong. All election occurs in one day, a sunday so everyone can vote, and the results usually come in less than 4 hours, because all vote is electronic.

I think a system of repeatability for voting is important. Once a voter has casted a vote, his vote should be able to be repeated without change in different systems at will to verify that his vote has not been tampered.<p>The system can work like this:<p>- Voter is assigned a unique ID, on his voting card issued upon verifying his identity. He can pick a security pin for added security.<p>- Voter is given a device thumb drive, RFID with some RAM, whatever storage device.<p>- Voter goes to a machine to vote. The machine cryptographically signs the voting result with his id. The machine writes the result to his storage device, emails him a copy, and/or puts the result on a public website. The machine also sends the result to a central server for compilation.<p>- Voter can go to any other machine on any other sites, plug in his result, his id, and his pin to see the voting result for verification. Voter can confirm by sending the result to central server. Or submit the signed result to third party website to display it for verification.<p>- If there's any mismatch, voter raises hell and demands to invalidate old vote (after verifying his identity, id, and pin), revote, and burn the tampering machine.<p>Edit: Id obviously means a public/private key pair.

This happened earlier as well during the early voting period (though Romney votes were being switched for Obama -- funny how one got coverage whilst the other didn't).<p>It's not some conspiracy, just a calibration error.<p>Source: <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electronic-Voting-Machines-In-Battleground-States-Switching-Romney-Votes-For-Obama" rel="nofollow">http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electroni...</a>

There have been problems like this in every election with these machines.<p>More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA!<p><a href="http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections/article20598.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-...</a> claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being in the GOP's favor. I have not personally verified, but it would not surprise me.<p>Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other. That happens in a lot of elections but not to the extent of this one. With weird results such as, because of a recent law in Ohio, polling workers have to ASK for ID, but due to a court decision, they can't stop you from voting if you DON'T have that ID. (Confused polling workers are sure to get this wrong.)<p>The general trend is that Republicans want as many barriers to voting in person as possible, while Democrats want as many to be able to vote as possible. That is because more marginal voters are much more likely to be Democrat than the general population. The stated reason is "to prevent fraud" even though there is very little evidence of such fraud in practice. On mail-in ballots this reverses, since the GOP expects a large portion of mail-in ballots to be from military people who are likely to vote Republican. Fraud has been more of an issue with mail-in ballots, but obviously people are not as worried about that.<p>Laws get broken as well. For instance the 2000 election was decided in Florida, in part due to a voter purge that the courts decided was illegal. See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File</a> for verification of that. The lesson learned is that voter purges work, which is why Florida was trying to do a purge this year at the last minute despite being warned that it was illegal. Because flipping the choice for President was easily worth the slap on the wrist they got afterwards.<p>There already have been laws broken this year (see <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-after-tossing-voter-registration-forms-in-virginia/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-aft...</a> and <a href="http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-investigation-into-fraudulent-florida-voter-letters/1258211" rel="nofollow">http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-...</a> for example), and everyone expects the lawyers to be gainfully employed as a result.<p>In short, get out your popcorn. When we exercise our right to vote, the vested interests exercise what they see as their right to manipulate the vote, and this time there is a decent chance of fireworks.

Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly?<p>The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines.<p>Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.

Can someone explain me like a five year old (european) how it is that...<p>You put a man on the moon, flew the space shuttle, have a rover sending holiday pics from mars, not to mention, your entire computer industrie....<p>But you can not make or agree a voting machine that actually works beyond reasonable doubt?!

How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?single=1" rel="nofollow">http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?s...</a>

Seems like the obvious solution would be to close off the broken voting machine.

Jeez, I thought HN people were sharper than this about modern technology. I'm not a Romney supporter but these voting machines are basic single touch interfaces with standard fat-finger algorithms. Lets have him pull back on the camera and show the rest of the screen. Specifically, where his other finger is at the time it selects Romney. His video is <i>highly</i> suspect to me.

Potential voter purging in Pennsylvania: <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/watchdog-evidence-unlawful-voter-purge-pennsylvania" rel="nofollow">http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/watchdog-evidence-un...</a><p>Oregon worker altering ballots in the GOP's favor: <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/06/oregon-election-worker-fired-for-altering-ballots-to-republican-straight-ticket/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/06/oregon-election-worker...</a><p>At least one worker taking votes and putting them under the voting box: <a href="https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/265907196372594688" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/265907196372594688</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/26590774867435110" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/26590774867435110</a><p>... What the hell is going on over there?

In the Netherlands they got rid of voting machines all together in 2008.<p>A group set out to ensure that the election process in the Netherlands would become as fraud resistant as it was before the advent of paperless voting computers. They demonstrated that the voting machines could be hacked. It wass also a risk because of the small group involved in getting the results out of these computers, with no real possibility to check if they are real (because the source code is not open). Committing fraud would only have to involve a few people.<p>On May 16, 2008 the Dutch government decided that elections in the Netherlands will be held using paper ballots and red pencil only. A proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers was rejected.<p>More info at <a href="http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English" rel="nofollow">http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English</a>

Who manufactures these machines? I'm curious whether or not they may be vulnerable to Van Eck Phreaking[1]. Brazil discovered taht the machines they were going to use were vulnerable to it.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking</a>

All this talk of electronic voting and one-way hash, etc confuses me. I know of no aspect of the US Constitution or federal law nor the constitution of any state in which I have resided which mandates a secret ballot. It might be a tradition or something but it certainly isn't a civil right.<p>I'm sure there is probably mountains of state law on the issue but I would have to wager any guarantee of secrecy would be just that, provided for on a state-by-state basis. I would appreciate it if anybody could correct my misunderstanding with citations.<p>I think its much more important for an election result to be trusted than for it to be secret. Having both is optimal but not necessary for a valid result under the law with which I am familiar.

Everyone's been spoiled by iPads etc., I guess. Old touch screens used to do this all the time. My Palm Pilot had a calibration app I'd have to run every few days/weeks.<p>If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.

Is it too much to ask to just completely open-source these voting machine? These machines decide the future of our country and affect the entire world. The least we could do is allow everyone to verify for themselves whether the machines are secure.

Calibration!! Really?? Any software/hardware developer here worth his/her salt would agree that can't be it. Let's see what could have happened: 1) The Y axis of the screen was maladjusted 2) Touch Sensitivity of the screen was reduced due to incorrect settings 3) Touch area had hair/dust/oil on it. But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Don't they have independent watchdogs looking after this thing in United States? If shit like this went down in India, the Election Commission would have simply closed the whole damn polling booth(for the day) and arrange separate polling on a later day with extra scrutiny and security.

Why does an otherwise fairly extraordinary country (space missions, amazing inventions, lots of creativity) manage to get basic stuff so completely wrong (bad toilet plumbing, units of measurement, paper currency, health care, dodgy voting). You need a proportional system. On paper. With hand counting by volunteers overseen by party reps. Stop with all the private enterprise technology stuff. Democracy is too precious to contract out to some lowest bidder. The Australian Electoral Commission runs all our ballots here and I have absolute confidence in them. Have a look at how other places run elections.

For those who are able to understand german and are not from the US, i highly recommend the newest alternativlos podcast for perspective:<p><a href="http://alternativlos.org/28/" rel="nofollow">http://alternativlos.org/28/</a>

Lower house - <a href="http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm#papers" rel="nofollow">http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm#papers</a><p>Senate - <a href="http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm#papers" rel="nofollow">http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm#paper...</a><p>This is how we vote in Australia. I have real trouble seeing any system of computerized voting or punch-card voting as superior having followed the United States' experiences.<p>What do you guys think? We use preferential-voting, so it's a little different but the idea is solid.

Obligatory reference: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s</a><p>I was surprised to see how similar it was.

Looks like a touch screen that isn't calibrated correctly.

This seems like a fairly poor way to implement voter fraud. The screen gives instant feedback. No Obama voter is going to say "Oh well, I guess I'll just cast my vote for Romney then."<p>If you were reprogramming the machine, wouldn't you be better off changing it to show Obama had been selected on the screen, but then print Romney onto the paper ballot? There's a better chance a voter won't bother scrutinizing the printout.

This is serious, but I'm getting a lot of amusing out of news reporters asking questions on Reddit, and have dozens of Reddit users pipe in with jokes.

In my opinion, this is very obviously a touchscreen calibration issue, probably caused by the use of a crappy (read: cheap) touchscreen in the voting machine.<p>A lot of people are dismissing the calibration issue because of the "calibration test" the user described performing:<p>"Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."<p>However, this test does <i>does not actually demonstrate anything</i>. With resistive and infrared touchscreens, which are commonly used in kiosks, it is entirely possible to have some subsections of the screen work incorrectly, while the rest works correctly. Therefore the fact that some buttons work fine does not prove that the touchscreen is, in fact, correctly calibrated.<p>I've done a lot of work with kiosk touchscreens, and the first culprit I thought of when seeing that video was that the touchscreen was miscalibrated. The second culprit I thought of was that the touchscreen itself was faulty.<p>Resistive and infrared touchscreens are very prone to these types of problems, and I've seen many scenarios similar to this across hundreds of different touchscreens. (Often, just one corner of the screen will go out of wack, while the rest of it works perfectly. I've seen this happen many times.)<p>The only way to know if the screen was actually correctly calibrated is to re-calibrate the screen and see if the issue persists, and if it does, to replace the touchscreen itself (as it could be faulty, not uncommon among cheap touchscreens either). Neither of these steps was performed by the user, therefore he has no way of concluding that the screen was correctly calibrated. I suspect that once these tests are performed, it will be obvious that the touchscreen is to blame.<p>There's a lot of outrage here at the idea of the voting machine altering votes, but I think the following quote applies: <i>never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.</i><p>The real outrage should be that these voting machines were deployed with such crappy touchscreens built into them (probably to cut costs for the manufacturer).

I'm not taking a stand on whether this is some weird edge case bug or whether it's a conspiracy, but I would like to point out that if it is fraud, it's an incredibly inept attempt. Using a checkbox <i>for visual confirmation</i> of a vote means the fraud was easily detectable. It would have been much better to mark the box for Obama but count the vote for Romney, if fraud is your goal.

I never understood why we would go for electronic voting. I couldn't care less about the discussion here about touch screens or GUIs. Computer should have no buisnes for important, secret elections!<p>In my opinion the risks and downsides of moving away from pen and paper clearly outweigh any of the laughable advantages - unless of course you profit from a system that is in-transparent and manipulatable.

Why doesn't the US just buy the system Brazil uses? In Brazil 1) everyone must vote and 2) they have strong reasons for wanting to make sure that no vote can ever be tied directly to the person who cast it.<p>They have such a system in place for over a decade, it works perfectly. Just buy that and use it instead of reinventing the wheel poorly.

I'm not trying to be snarky: could someone explain to me why this is HN-worthy (or at least worth 609 points)? In an election with thousands of voting machines, the probability is high enough that at least a few of them will be defective in some way; it should be expected as far as I can tell.

What show was it that discussed what would happen with a large number of very smart engineers and voting? I recall a TV show back in the day that basically said "We don't use electronic voting because it's too easy to game". I think it was one of the episodes of Sliders.

It looks like the touch screen might need to be calibrated. This used to happen on a POS system I worked with.<p>I think the title is link bait. The voting machine isn't altering the vote. It's just off kilter. Besides, it's not like the user didn't know what box was being checked!

It seems to me a way to mitigate this risk of part of the screen not working is to randomize the order with which the candidates are displayed. The error would presumably average itself out. Either way this is unacceptable.

I would be more outraged if the video actually showed him tapping the other candidates to prove that they worked correctly. He says that tapping the others worked fine but there is no proof of this in the video.

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." - Jumpers (1972)

Canadian here but I'm curious wouldn't it make sense for voting machines to have independent dual screens instead of a single screen where the possibility of a calibration error could exist?

Wouldn't it be a good idea to have some sort of automated remote monitoring system which would randomly ping each machine for diagnostics data and shutdown machines if any issues discovered?

If you don't want to have your vote altered. You can go on <a href="https://poutsch.com" rel="nofollow">https://poutsch.com</a> The cool thing is that the whole planet can vote there!

I asked for paper ballot this morning. Many volunteers are cheerful and apathetic, for them its just another gig. Lost on them is the fact this is something fundamental. Scary !!

What do you expect? Opaque source-code, machines produced by companies linked to the Republicans, and all that in a failing state. Stuff like that was obviously going to happen.

Why not this <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau...</a> ?

What <i>exactly</i> are supposed to be the benefits of electronic voting machines over sliping a piece of paper in an enveloppe and putting it in an urn?

This exact scenario also happened on video in 2008:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHwNZkNFlI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHwNZkNFlI</a>

This seriously pisses me the fuck off. Just how the hell do we not have the technology yet for accurate touch-screen technology in voting machines?

Simpsons did it... <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ</a>

The US uses a federal agency to collect income taxes, so why won't it do the obvious thing and create one to run federal elections?

Is it real, and Republicans are fraudsters? Or is it a fake, and Democrats are fraudsters? Or is a Republican plant of a fake so that I believe I hate Democrats?!? Or maybe even Democrats planted an obvious fake, to make me think Republicans posted the fake, so that I'd know it's fake and end up disrespecting Republicans for the poor attempt at influencing me?!?!?!<p>Too confusing. I'm staying home.

confirmed by NBC <a href="http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl" rel="nofollow">http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl</a>

This is nothing. I was texting on my phone and it changed "Romny" to "Ronny."<p>Microsoft must be behind it.

Why does this matter? The majority of votes is not the decider in this 'democracy'.

Is there any evidence that what it records actually matches the screen anyway?

A bit off-topic, but how do recounts work with electronic voting machines?

Much worse would be altering your vote without showing you that it did so

A $300 iPad does a better job than this $3,500 voting machine.

I hope this is a hoax.

voting cannot be computerized ever without risk of manipulation. voting will always have to be on paper in the interest of democracy.

LOL probably just needs to touch a little bit lower on the screen. If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you should NOT be allowed to vote.

that's nonsense, it was just a screen screwup and there's a paper trail on those machines, thank god.

He who casts a vote decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything

Oh, how sad the vigilante cannot film the pesky RAM-inhabiting daemon, that summate counting and distributes electronic votes according to the AdSense spending of every candidate. Even the iPhone is not capable of doing that surveillance.

Obviously staged, obviously edited, obviously fake.