Whoa: Virus in Voting Machines in NY23 Interfered With Vote Tallies?

Pretty serious stuff.

Republican Commissioner Judith Peck refused to speculate on whether the code that governs the counts could have been tampered with. She indicated that "as far as I know, the machine in question was not functioning properly and was repaired" by the technician.

Commissioners in other counties have stated that they were not made aware of the virus issue in Hamilton County. In Jefferson County, inspectors from four districts claim that "human error" resulted in their "mistakenly" entering 0 votes for Hoffman in several districts, resulting in Owens leading Jefferson County on election night though the recanvas of the computer counts now show that Hoffman is leading. Jefferson County has not conducted a manual paper ballot recount.

In St. Lawrence County, machines in Louisville, Waddington, Claire, and Rossie "broke" early in the voting process on election day. Republican Commissioner Deborah Pahler said that the machines kept "freezing up... like Windows does all the time," and that they experienced several paper jams as well. The voted ballots that could not be scanned were placed in an Emergency Lock Box and re-scanned later at the St. Lawrence County Board of Elections. Election officials in St. Lawrence County were given no advance knowledge of a potential virus in the system.

At least one County official thus far has raised concern that it's possible that ALL of the machines used in the NY-23 election had the 'virus' but only a few malfunctioned as a result. The counts from any district that used the ImageCast machines are suspect due to "the virus" discovered in Hamilton County, last-minute "reprogramming" by Dominion workers, and security flaws in the systems themselves. A manual paper-ballot recount of the vote could resolve computer vote accuracy questions.

Given the virus, and given the four "human error" tallies of zero votes for Hoffman, how can they possibly resist a full manual recount?

Drew predicted this would happen with these new machines, didn't he?

Remember the idiocy of people demanding computerized balloting machines in the wake of Bush v. Gore? Remember how transparently stupid that was, even at the time, to anyone who gave it more than three seconds thought?

People become utterly stupid when they get into herd/riot mode.

Via Jim Treacher's Twitter.

It's Over? Hoffman trails by more votes than there are left to be counted.

Ah, but there's always that hail Mary of a recount.

But... yeah, it's kind of over.

posted by Ace at 04:50 PM

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