Butthole Bandits 7 and a throwback to Jim Crowe

[Lemur]

Romney's incredibly slim financial interest is in solely in the voting machine company doing well

Yep, nothing suspicious here, so let's get back to the real threat: in-person vote fraud!

Voting machine provider Hart Intercivic will be counting the votes in various counties in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Colorado and elsewhere throughout the country come Nov. 6 — even though it has extensive corporate ties to the Mitt Romney camp, and even though a study commissioned by the state of Ohio has labeled its voting system a “failure” when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections. [...]

Four of the HIG directors, Tony Tamer, John Bolduc, Douglas Berman and Brian D. Schwartz, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and HIG manager Brian Shortsleeve, and, according to Opensecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics, HIG Capital has contributed $338,000 to the Romney campaign this year. [...]

The Hart system performed “poorly” because unauthorized individuals could gain access to memory cards and “easily tamper” with core voting data, and Hart scored a “zero” on the 12-step baseline comparison because it “failed to meet any of the 12 basic best practices” necessary to have a secure system. [...]

The Project Everest report asserted that the Hart system “lacks the technical protections necessary to guarantee a trustworthy election under operational conditions.” Ultimately, it concluded with words that may prove haunting come Nov. 6: “The vulnerabilities and features of the system work in concert to provide ‘numerous opportunities to manipulate election outcomes or cast doubt on legitimate election activities … virtually every ballot, vote, election result, and audit log is ‘forgeable or otherwise manipulatable by an attacker with even brief access to the voting systems.’ ”