However it's the touchscreens errors that prove most sinister. Not only are these errors profoundly illusive, without a voter-marked paper ballot, the evidence walks away as soon as the votes are cast. As a result, if the voter doesn't trap the error, it's gone. So as a voter, it's up to you to debug ES&S's errors . . . after waiting in line, wading through the sign-in screening process, waiting in line again before finally bellying up to the touchscreen . . . Well first figure out the ballot after straining to read the touchscreen, then touch-n-poke your way through the ballot on a machine you see maybe once every two years or so. . . on an input screen that changes with every election. By the time you finally get through touching-n-poking and . . . the touchscreen asks you to confirm your vote . . . for the wrong candidate. Do you even notice it's wrong? Or do you say, "Yeah, yeah just let me out of here. Click. I know I did it right." Think Walmart. How carefully do you check your receipt? Do you so much as glance over the items? Or is it too long, too annoying? The total seems about right. Just let me outta here. Crunch. Toss. Gone.
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ES&S: They know and they knew their touchscreens didn't work:
ES&S has known about vote-flipping and drifting candidates for years. See "Time Bombs Waiting To Go Off," below. So why is it up to the voters to catch these errors? After all when was the last time you caught a pricing error? A bank error? Yet every election, the errors creep back. And when the counting's done, the machines are tucked safely away for the next election.
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The proof is in the numbers. During 2008/2009, ES&S election errors continue to roll in as documented by these states: AR, AZ, CA, FL, IN, KS, OH, IL, MA, MI, MN, NC, NE, NM, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, WI, WV, FL . . . FL . . . FL . . . Some have actual backups in the form of voter marked paper ballots. Others do not. But all incurred errors with their ES&S equipment that changed the final election results.
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Still, there's nothing wrong with the voting machines, right? Must be a user error, right? Remember the byline, "Those ol' fossils don't know how to vote down there in Florida." Even Florida's own Secretary of State is guilty of that one. Well, now comes 2008 and 2009 and the excuse is, "You guys at Elections need to calibrate your machines." Calibrate?!! If those persnickety little lying PC's don't work for you, the voter, first time every time, they don't work. Period. (See "What's that mean? Calibration drift, smoothing filters, and vanishing votes," below.)
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The Truth Will Out:
"I voted for Obama, but my vote went to McCain," and "I voted for Kerry, but the touchscreen told me to confirm my vote for Bush." "Why should I vote? My vote doesn't count anyway." 2008, 2006, 2004, 2002 . . . Every election, news reports and voting logs record the same problems: Flipped votes, lost votes, vote-counting errors. Yet it wasn't until late 2008 that mounting evidence of ES&S flip-flopping and vanishing votes during early voting gained enough traction to skip past some of the standard ES&S roadblocks to fair and accurate elections when after a series of early voting incidents, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law sent letters to all ES&S iVotronic Secretaries of State warning, "There is a real chance that voters using iVotronic machines in your state will experience "vote flipping' similar to that experienced by voters in West Virginia."(The iVotronic "Vote Flipping" Statements & Testimony by Lawrence Norden, Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice and Pamela Smith, President, Verified Voting.)
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Then finally in April 2009, after years of authenticated vote-flipping and vanishing votes, VotersUnite.org recorded this entry in its log: "Vote flipping is a known problem that affects 22,619 ES&S iVotronic voting machines. . . ES&S admits that calibration may not hold through the entire Election Day . . ." The entry refers to vote-flipping in Kansas. And when Saline County Clerk Don Merriman consulted ES&S about the errors reported during April's early election, he was told that calibration on his touchscreen machines might change during the day. "What they've seen is calibration drift on a unit. . . They're fine in the morning, but by afternoon they're starting to lose their calibration. This "calibration drift" or sudden-out-of-calibration problem affects [at least] 22,619 touchscreens cited in a lawsuit filed in late 2005. ("'Vote flipping' was not unexpected," by DUANE SCHRAG, Salina Journal, Kansas, 4/10/2009)
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What's that mean? Calibration drift, smoothing filters, and vanishing votes:
"The problem was this: When a voter pressed a certain candidate's bar on the voting machine's screen, the candidate above the selected candidate instead received the checkmark." (Saline Journal Faulty-Election)
