Butthole Bandits 7 and a throwback to Jim Crowe

[Lemur]

Then Romney would just buy paper, YOU FOOL

Amusing, but you might want to have a serious think about the implications of private companies holding the keys to our voting process. Imagining plausible conflicts of interest will not strain your brain.

[Major Robert Dump]

Yes, it is a conflict of interest and has the potential to lead to bad things, but MY GUY would never abuse the process.......
MY GUY resigned from the company before they got that golden contract that they did a crummy job contracting.....
MY GUY uses a blind trust, it's blind I swear, so MY GUY would never vote on an issue that affects his pocket book because MY GUY uses a blind trust, yeah....

In the 2nd debate the thing that really grated me was when Romney shot back at Obama over Chinese investments, and Obama's comeback was basically "well you have more than I do and I don't check mine as often as you do."

It's no longer a question of whose hand is in the cookie jar. Now we just argue who has more cookies

[Kralizec]

The first election I voted in (EU parliament) was with a machine. I'm pretty sure that every election since I've voted on paper. Voting computers have been used in other parts of the countries for local elections, but the types that were used in the Netherlands so far were banned alltogether a couple of years ago.

If voting machines are potentially unsafe then they should not be used, period. Besides the fact that they're distrusted by so many people should be reason enough not to want them. Spending a little money and some extra dead trees is not an unreasonable expense for a fair and trusted election.

On a different note - over here you can sit on your couch and still receive the papers required for voting from your home town, assuming of course you're a registered resident. I don't understand why people should have to register themselves in order to vote.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Romney's incredibly slim financial interest is in solely in the voting machine company doing well, so his interest is in the machines being invulnerable to tampering. Investing in a company that has invested in a voting machine company is such an absurd thing to see as sinister. Assuming that conspiracy theory bradblog guy is correct about the financial connection in the first place...

“Not only does Solamere have no direct or indirect interest in this company [Hart Intercivic], Solamere and its partners have no ownership in this company, nor do they have any ownership in nor have made any investments in the fund that invested in the voting machine company,” the spokesman said.

So while Solamere does partner with HIG on investments, none of those investments involve Hart Intercivic. HIG may be simultaneously managing investments with both companies, but the investments are kept separate, as required by law. Put simply, Tagg Romney is not an “investor in a voting machine company.”

MY GUY uses a blind trust, it's blind I swear, so MY GUY would never vote on an issue that affects his pocket book because MY GUY uses a blind trust, yeah....

You really think it's plausible that Romney cares about making more money?

[Montmorency]

Romney's incredibly slim financial interest is in solely in the voting machine company doing well, so his interest is in the machines being invulnerable to tampering.

'Romney has no interest in tampering with voting machines because it's not his interest'?

“Not only does Solamere have no direct or indirect interest in this company [Hart Intercivic], Solamere and its partners have no ownership in this company, nor do they have any ownership in nor have made any investments in the fund that invested in the voting machine company,” the spokesman said.

So while Solamere does partner with HIG on investments, none of those investments involve Hart Intercivic. HIG may be simultaneously managing investments with both companies, but the investments are kept separate, as required by law. Put simply, Tagg Romney is not an “investor in a voting machine company.”

Certainly something in need of careful verification.

[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.’ ”

[Strike For The South]

Amusing, but you might want to have a serious think about the implications of private companies holding the keys to our voting process. Imagining plausible conflicts of interest will not strain your brain.

ok then I will also believe that Bill Ayers controls Obamas presidency from his basement

Ghosts, ghosts everywhere

[Lemur]

ok then I will also believe that Bill Ayers controls Obamas presidency from his basement

You're always funny, Strike, but you're not normally dense.

Read up. Consider the problems inherent in handing the keys to elections to private companies. Really, this ain't rocket science, nor is it tinfoil hat land.

People are scummy and will quickly seize any advantage. This is not a Republican or a Democrat thing, it's a human nature thing. You simply do not leave the cookie jar unguarded.

[Strike For The South]

You're always funny, Strike, but you're not normally dense.

Read up. Consider the problems inherent in handing the keys to elections to private companies. Really, this ain't rocket science, nor is it tinfoil hat land.

People are scummy and will quickly seize any advantage. This is not a Republican or a Democrat thing, it's a human nature thing. You simply do not leave the cookie jar unguarded.

The more troubling thing to me is that this system failed the saftey tests and everyone seems apathetic.

I'm not interested in playing six degrees of Romney, the man has money everywhere and could be tied to every major company in America if you looked hard enough. Hell my emaciated 401k probably has investments I would find morally iffy. Romney doesn't know what investments his investments make, nor his son.

But for a moment, let's assume this is true. There is enough democratic power in Ohio to at least call for an investigation on the merits of these crappy machines. So why not? If they are failing election tests, coupled with their supposed handlers, why is this story still on the fringes?

[Lemur]

If they are failing election tests, coupled with their supposed handlers, why is this story still on the fringes?

I don't know that Salon, CNN Money, and Ars Technica are what you'd call "fringe." And apparently many states lack the money to switch away from the private companies. For now.

Ernest Zirkle was puzzled. The resident of Fairfield Township in Cumberland County, NJ, ran for a seat on his local Democratic Executive Committee on June 7, 2011. The official results showed him earning only nine votes, compared to 34 votes for the winning candidate.

But at least 28 people told Zirkle they voted for him. So he and his wife—who also ran for an open seat and lost—challenged the result in court. Eventually, a county election official admitted the result was due to a programming error. A security expert from Princeton was called in to examine the machines and make sure no foul play had occurred. Unfortunately, when he examined the equipment on August 17, 2011, he found someone deleted key files the previous day, making it impossible to investigate the cause of the malfunction. A new election was held on September 27, and the Zirkles won. [...]

In 2008, 16 voters in West Virginia "reported vote flipping on the state's touchscreen direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. All reported that when they selected Obama, the machine switched their vote to McCain." That same year in seven Texas counties that collectively used voting machines from three different vendors, voters selected the straight-ticket Democratic option only to have their votes changed to straight-ticket Republican.

The errors don't stop there. A similar problem was reported in Craven County, North Carolina, in 2010. A technical glitch in Butler County, Ohio, caused 200 votes to go uncounted in 2008. In Pennington County, South Dakota, in 2009, a computer responsible for tabulating the vote totals from multiple individual voting machines malfunctioned. It added thousands of imaginary votes to the total. (Luckily, the mistake was caught after election officials noticed that the total was inconsistent with the figures reported by individual machines.)

Joe Hall, an e-voting expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, tells us these kinds of glitches are unsurprising given the decentralized way the United States organizes its elections.

[Major Robert Dump]

I went to vote early today, but got the polling machine mixed up with a Red Box, and when I tried to vote for Obama I ended up getting some Tyler Perry movie about a fat grandma

[Lemur]

This demonstrates why in-person voting fraud is maybe the stupidest idea ever (and why no self-respecting criminal enterprise would use it at scale)

Investigators today arrested a Southern Nevada woman suspected of trying to vote twice this week at two different polling locations.

Roxanne Rubin was taken into custody as she arrived for work at the Riviera hotel-casino, investigators said. Rubin, 56, is a registered Republican who lives in Henderson, according to the Clark County Registrar.

Rubin allegedly cast a vote Monday at the Anthem Community Center in Henderson. Later that day, she tried to vote a second time at an early voting location on Eastern Avenue, investigators said.

When Rubin arrived at the second location, a poll worker conducted a routine database check and found Rubin had already voted. When confronted by the poll worker, Rubin denied having voted and claimed the database used by the poll worker was wrong. [...]

Rubin was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on one felony count of voting twice in the same election.