A Pennsylvania County’s Election Day Nightmare Underscores Voting Machine Concerns
THE ARTICLE SAYS THE “BALLOTS” (summary cards) WERE RE-COUNTED BY HAND BUT THEY WERE ACTUALLY SCANNED BY MACHINE...KEVIN SKOGLUND IS ASKING @nytimes
TO PRINT A CORRECTION
nyti.ms/2rGZTkk
THE ARTICLE SAYS THE “BALLOTS” (summary cards) WERE RE-COUNTED BY HAND BUT THEY WERE ACTUALLY SCANNED BY MACHINE...KEVIN SKOGLUND IS ASKING @nytimes
TO PRINT A CORRECTION
nyti.ms/2rGZTkk
"Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots... Some machines reported 0 votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate’s 0 votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong."
"With clearly faulty results in at least the judge’s election, officials began counting the paper backup ballots generated by the same machines. The paper ballots showed Mr. Kassis winning narrowly, 26,142 to 25,137, over his opponent, the Republican Victor Scomillio."
Officials are relying on ballots printed by a machine that has already produced obviously faulty results. You need to know who won. You add up the votes on a calculator & it gives you bad data. Do you go back & add up the results on the same calculator? #HandMarkedPaperBallots
“People were questioning, and even I questioned, that if some of the numbers are wrong, how do we know that there aren’t mistakes with anything else?” said Matthew Munsey, the chairman of the Northampton County Democrats"
"The prevailing theory is that the touch screens were plagued by a bug in the software." What is a bug? A bug is a virus or glitch in the software that tells the machine to count the votes differently than it is supposed to.
If there can be a bug on these systems then there can be a bug on the 6300 other ExpressVote XL machines in use across the country. And then all this talk about how the machines are so secure that no bugs can ever get on them is baloney.
An ES&S spokesperson calls what the machines produce "voter-verified paper ballots"... these are not voter-verified ballots because studies show that most voters do not look at or verify them. These are machine-printed summary cards that count using unverifiable barcodes.
An ES&S spokesperson calls the procedure to confirm the results of this election a "successful postelection risk-limiting audit,” But the creator of risk-limiting audits calls that " patently false" and resigned from @VerifiedVoting to prove his point.
These faulty ExpressVote XL machines were used even though they did not function correctly in pre-election testing. "The automatic tests in Northampton proved problematic & did not even cast a test vote for every candidate...But the machines were still rolled out on Election Day.
Also the ExpressVote XL has a function that will make your HAIR STAND ON END. “Mr. Skoglund said. “It is especially concerning that it can send made-up votes to the vote counting software without needing a real ballot. Fake ballots are a feature no voting machine should have.”
ES&S says "there are nearly 6,300 ExpressVoteXL voting machines in use across the country & none had experienced similar counting problems to those in Northampton County." But how many incorrect results have been reported by these expensive poorly functioning devices is unknown.
