While not unexpected, this appears to be the first confirmed issue with voting machines so far today. It happened in Pennsylvania.
CBS reports:
There have been some scattered issues where voters are encountering problems.
Election judges in Clinton Township, Butler County confirmed there were issues with two of their eight automated voting machines. Most of the issues came when people tried to vote straight party ticket.
However, other said they specifically wanted to vote for Republican Donald Trump only to see their vote switched before their eyes to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“I went back, pressed Trump again. Three times I did this, so then I called one of the women that were working the polls over. And she said you must be doing it wrong. She did it three times and it defaulted to Hillary every time,” Bobbie Lee Hawranko said.
Officials have recalibrated the machines and are confident that the problem has been resolved.
Allegheny County has also been dealing with some Election Day issues.
What’s particularly disturbing about all of this is that people we flagging concerns about these machines weeks before the election.
For example, as CBS News warned on October 25, 2016:
In a Philadelphia warehouse, almost 4,000 electronic voting machines are ready to be rolled out. But some cybersecurity experts warn the machines – which are used in most Pennsylvania counties – are vulnerable.
“It’s a relatively lucrative target if you want to try and manipulate something,” said Ben Johsnon, a former NSA engineer now with cybersecurity group Carbon Black. “It’s really around creating doubt: doubt in democracy; doubt in the integrity of the election process.”
He said these direct recording electronic machines don’t have paper backups of each ballot cast, making a recount in a tight race difficult.
Republican elections commissioner Al Schmidt sees some issues with Pennsylvania’s voting procedures. He wrote a report on voting irregularities during the 2012 election. There have been dozens of cases but only 10 prosecutions.
“Voter fraud does occur, but that’s a completely different animal from vote rigging, right, or rampant voter fraud, which would involve hundreds of people stealing thousands of votes to change the outcome of a presidential election,” Schmidt says.
Schmidt says even without a paper trail, the electronic machines are safe because they do keep a digital record of votes cast. And, he points out, the individual machines are not connected to the internet.
“Our voting system has more in common with household appliance than a laptop or anything like that,” Schmidt said.
It wasn’t just CBS either. The Los Angeles Times also flagged PA voting machines as particularly concerning.
Here are a few excerpts from it’s October 20, 2016 article, Pennsylvania’s Aging Voting Machines Could Be ‘Nightmare Scenario’ in the Event of a Disputed Election:
On election day, voters in Pennsylvania will be touching the lighted buttons on electronic vote counters that were once seen as the solution to messy paper ballots.
But in the event of a disputed election, this battleground state — one of the few that relies almost entirely on computerized voting, with no paper backup — could end up creating a far bigger mess.
Stored in a locked warehouse near downtown Harrisburg, the 1980s-era voting machines used by Dauphin County look like discarded washing machines lined up in rows. When unfolded and powered up, the gray metal boxes become the familiar voting booth, complete with a curtain for privacy.
But computer experts says the old electronic voting machines have a hidden flaw that worries them in the event of a very close election. The machines do not produce a paper ballot or receipt, leaving nothing to be recounted if the election outcome were in doubt, such as in 2000, when the nation awaited anxiously for Florida to reexamine those hanging chads.
“The nightmare scenario would be if Pennsylvania decides the election and it is very close. You would have no paper records to do a recount,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, co-author last year of a report on the risk posed by old voting machines.
Pennsylvania is among those states that rely almost entirely on computerized voting, according to Verified Voting.
“Pennsylvania is using technology from the ’80s made by the companies that don’t exist anymore. In computer years, that’s a very long time ago,” Smith said.
Marian Schneider, a voting rights lawyer who was appointed last year as Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary for elections, said she was well aware of the problem with electronic machines. Still, the “risk of tampering is very low,” she said.
But Andrew Appel, a Princeton professor of computer science, said that given a screwdriver and seven minutes with an electronic machine, he could “install a vote-stealing program” that would be hard to detect and shift a percentage of the votes.
In states like Pennsylvania, these voting machines “are delivered to polling places several days before the election — to elementary schools, churches and firehouses,” he said. That creates the risk of tampering. “This is not just one glitch in one manufacturer’s machine. It’s the very nature of computers,” he told a House subcommittee last month.
Feaser said state and local officials take precautions to ensure machines are kept secure and can’t be tampered with.
But Appel nevertheless recommends that the nation “eliminate the use of paperless touchscreen voting machines” after this year’s election.
Naturally, there have been plenty of other machine-reletated issues beyond Pennsylvania. For example, here’s what Fox in Detroit is reporting:
(WJBK) – The polls have been open in Michigan for a couple hours now, and FOX 2 has received dozens of calls and emails from voters saying the machine at their polling place isn’t working correctly.
An overwhelming number of voters from several cities report the machine isn’t able to accept the ballot, so they’ve had to leave their ballot in the hands of the volunteers. Many say the machines are malfunctioning or jamming. FOX 2 has taken calls and emails from voters in Detroit, Sterling Heights, Novi, Holly and Roseville – just to name a few.
Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey tells FOX 2, “Defective machines will be swapped out. All ballots will be put through and all votes will be tabulated.”
Many voters are concerned, though, that their vote may not be counted since they won’t be there to physically see it go through the machine.
FOX 2 has also spoken with some election volunteers who are frustrated because they’re not sure who to contact for help getting a new machine.
FOX 2 is working to confirm these machine issues and how they will be resolved.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
Follow me on Twitter.
I think the ONLY way to fix all this Cr-P is to invalidate BOTH candidates, force them out of the race and start a new electoral process.
Welcome to the North American Banana Republic.
As I’ve already said before, this is going to be a massive clusterfuck.
This shit started in the early voting in several States, and the vast majority of the so-called “technical glitches” with the electronic voting machines in the early voting were people casting votes for Trump that ended up recording a vote for Hillary.
That is not a coincidence. There is no such thing as “luck” (good or bad) or coincidence.
Trump’s people already knew this was coming compliments of the DNC, because they did the same thing to Bernie Sanders. Which is exactly why he has refused to say that he would accept the results of the election if he loses.