Five-hour wait times to vote in Arizona. Broken voting machines in Florida. Poorly trained poll workers in California. North Carolina voters wrongly denied provisional ballots. In Georgia, a voter sent 227 miles from his correct polling place by a poll … Read More
Crossposted from Occupy For Accountability
Two weeks ago we published a letter we received at our whistleblower Post Office Box from a shadowy group of cyber sleuths called “The Protectors.” In short, the letter stated that the group installed a firewall on servers that were going to be used by Karl Rove to manipulate election results. Moreover, the letter stated that the group also caused the catastrophic failure of Team Romney’s ORCA get out the vote project.
At the time, we questioned whether these were two separate attacks and whether the ORCA attack, if separate, would be moral and legal. We have gathered additional information and have concluded that ORCA and the digital manipulation scheme were most likely two prongs of Karl Rove’s plan to rig election results and that The Protectors’ firewalls may have caused the failure of ORCA and was therefore more than likely legally justified.
-By Stephen C. Webster
November 6, 2012- A voting machine in Pennsylvania was “taken out of service” for flipping votes for President Barack Obama to Republican challenger Mitt Romney, MSNBC reporter Zachary Roth confirmed Tuesday afternoon.
The shocking error was revealed by a YouTube video published by user “centralpavote,” an account apparently created solely to share this particular video. In a description, the video’s author explains:
My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.
Revelations by the Columbus, Ohio, Free Press that untested software has been installed in Ohio's vote tabulation system, and closely linked ownership of voting machines by Romney family members and campaign operatives, underscore a serious electronic threat to the integrity of Tuesday's national election, and the desperate need for universal hand-counted paper ballots.
Reliance on electronic voting machines means power outages from Hurricane Sandy could deprive many Americans of their right to vote and throw the election into chaos. Opaque, unmonitorable electronic vote counts add to public skepticism about the integrity of the vote count that continues to escalate dating to Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004.
Election protection activists have joined with the Green Party to demand that the United States join Ireland in scrapping its electronic voting machines and return to universal hand-counted paper ballots, currently in use in Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Canada and elsewhere.