What does it mean when 22,619 of your individual voting machines are flipping and losing votes? The severity of the nationwide impact of defective voting machines cannot be over exaggerated. Particularly when an error rate of 20 to 25 percent per defective machine is not out of line. In an election with just 5 races on the ballot, potentially 2,261,900 votes are lost or flipped. (Please see Checking the Numbers and more importantly Counting the Machines at the end of this article. While 22,619 is the publically cited number of defective machines, this batch of machines has been replaced by a new batch of machines that also proves to be defective.)
The implications of failed voting machines are staggering for every election, big and small, current and past. Consider the winner and loser of your favorite election. If the race was close, or the exit polls disagreed with the win, or even if the winning candidate's name was placed above the losing candidate on the ballot . . . this favorite election of yours is profoundly suspect.m
While this article concentrates on the implications of the defective touchscreens, every election, every race, every vote in which votes were cast and counted on any ES&S equipment is suspect.
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Over 76 million voters in 1,992 jurisdictions across America will vote on ES&S equipment when they vote. Of these, nearly 26 million registered voters in 415 jurisdictions across America will vote on ES&S iVotronic touchscreens. (VerifiedVoting.org)
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ES&S: Every election, every race, every vote is suspect:
As Election Systems & Software (ES&S) takes over voting America with its purchase of Premier Election Solutions/Diebold, how many Americans know firsthand their votes didn't count? Or worse still, how many votes actually flipped to the other guy? (ES&S Acquires Premier Election Solutions. This is just wrong on so many levels.) m
Who did you vote for in 2008, 2006, 2004, 2002? If you cast your vote on one of ES&S's vote-flipping touchscreens, chances are it tossed your vote away. Your vote didn't count. Or perhaps you're one of the lucky ones who bubbled in your own hand-marked paper ballot. Think your votes are safe? Not so. If an ES&S ballot scanner sucked it in, or ES&S software tallied it up, or ES&S printed your ballot, your vote might not have counted either.
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Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) is an all service, beginning-to-end election provider. They record your vote on their touchscreens . . . or not. They count your paper ballot on their scanners . . . or not. They even print the paper ballots to secure your votes . . . or not. And finally at the end of the day, they tally up the results . . . or not. Failures during all aspects of ES&S high-tech voting systems remain pandemic: touchscreens, ballot scanners, ballot tabulation and reporting. Even their ballot printing is suspect since their own ES&S scanners can't always read the ballots ES&S prints.
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Ballot scanning and tallying errors can be an easy fix . . . or not. That is if and when you know there's a problem. You can always scoop up your paper ballots and count them by hand. Just as they did in Minnesota when the ES&S counts proved to be unreliable in the U.S. Senate race between Al Franken and incumbent Norm Coleman. A long and arduous task, but every vote got counted. ES&S tabulation errors can be so insidious. In another election this summer, ES&S doubled the final results, reporting 10,488 votes when only 5,613 ballots were cast. "It's not that we found ballots. It's not that we lost ballots . . . It's just [ES&S] combining them didn't work." Fortunately this error was discovered the night of the election, unfortunately after everyone had gone home believing there would be a runoff election. This and other miscounts might not have been discovered at all. ("Scanner glitch blamed for election miscounts," Emilie Rusch, 06/04/09)
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