I appreciate the efforts of people working to document obvious failures of DRE voting machines but I don't want anyone to lose sight of the fact that no matter how many machines obviously fail or don't obviously fail, what's wrong with these machines is that they are unable to be independently verified. It's not like we need to wonder about why that's a problem. Last year in Bucks County an election was decided by fewer votes than the number of votes involved in a discrepancy between votes cast and voters signed in. The case went to a judge who decided that
“Beyond the conclusions asserted by petitioners, there was no evidentiary basis to suggest that the machine had malfunctioned and there were adequate and plausible reason given for the discrepancy between the poll book numbers and the numbers recorded on the electronic machines,”
So the machine's results stood even though they were impossible to audit independently because there were no voter-marked paper ballots to count. The machine didn't obviously fail. It didn't burst into flame. It didn't come to life and kill anyone. It just sat there, unauditable and trusted to pick the winner. Welcome to November 2008 because 90% of PA voters vote on machines just like that. There's a lot of talk in the election integrity world about Pennsylvania being the next Florida. I'm with them. But even if there isn't any uproar because the machines worked fine, remember that absent proper recounts of voter-marked paper ballots, you won't know who won. And also remember that it will be the fault of everyone who has ignored this problem since 2000, which is just about everyone.
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