Nevada Voting Machines Automatically Check Harry Reid for Senate - Similar Voting Problems Reported In Other Areas

Not too surprising.

Fox5News in Las Vegas reports, "Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines."

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharon Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

"Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong."

Fox5News states, Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said there is no voter fraud, although the issues do come up because the touch-screens are sensitive. For that reason, a person may not want to have their fingers linger too long on the screen after they make a selection at any time.

Well, of course people's fingers are naturally going to drift over to the selection for Harry Reid on the ballot. - To me, it makes perfect sense.

But here's another wrinkle in the fabric. The Washington Examiner reports that Clark County's voting machine technicians are SEIU members. Clark County has the distinction of being home to 75% of Nevadans.

Mark Hemmingway writes in the Examiner, "there's absolutely no independently verified evidence of chicanery with the voting machines (yet), but it is worth noting that the voting machine technicians in Clark County are members of the Service Employees International Union.

The SEIU spent $63 million in elections in 2008 and is planning on spending $44 million more this election cycle -- nearly all of that on Democrats. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is formerly the SEIU's top lobbyist, and former SEIU president Andy Stern was the most frequent vistor to the White House last year."

Lest we digress into the realm of guilt by association, I'll concede that mistakes happen, and 'glitches' do occur but I don't draw much comfort from headlines around the country that read:

Man said he voted straight-party ticket and got opposite results

A Craven County voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.

Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

'They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,' Laughinghouse said. 'That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.'”

When you can’t persuade voters Cheat

From Yuma County Arizona; 3000 voter registration forms were all dropped off at once by the one group on the deadline to turn in voter registration forms.

* Almost all of the registrations were for the Democratic Party, a statistical improbability at best.

* Today, these same 3000 newly registered voters — as a group — had papers dropped off at the Yuma Recorder’s office requesting to be signed up for the permanent early voters list… which means the ballots will be mailed early, with no accountability.

* The Yuma Recorder’s office is checking the voter registration forms and have found that already more than 65% of them are invalid due to the registrant not being a citizen, wrong/invalid address, false signature, etc.

We’d Better Win Big

It’s going to be a long week when the first two stories you see reflect just how big the “margin of cheating” is going to be this year.

And a blast from the past.

New ACORN effort is mobilizing voters, run by woman indicted for violating election laws

And now this from the IT sector via Dallas Observer Blog regarding touch-screen voting machines from Marketplace Tech Report:

J. Alex Halderman, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, regarding a similar incident that occured in Dallas, tells Marketplace Tech Report, "This is a known class of problems with touch-screen voting machines." Halderman elaborates on the problem in this radio interview,

"These machines just are not transparent. There is no way that to voter can observe the process of the votes being counted, and know that it was done correctly and honestly.

Researchers have found studying machines of this type that they can be reprogrammed. In fact I've done several studies of different machines like this and have reprogrammed them myself to demonstrate how fraud could occur.

But the bottom line is that if there isn't a paper record that people can manually count and audit, then it's entirely possible that fraud or even malfunctions like this could slip by undetected."

It was Josef Stalin who said, "I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how." Do you think Dems, in their bid to cling to power in light of the electoral Tsunami that is about to sweep them away next week, have ripped a page from the playbook of one of the world's most odious despots?

There are precious few things in life that are sacrosanct anymore; the integrity of the vote and the vote process is one of them.