I just did election official training in Columbus ohio...ask me anything

[seriousstan]

ESS Ivotronic machines

[NMDemDist2]

1. can you hack the vote??

:evilgrin:

[seriousstan]

3. I couldn't

[Eric J in MN]

2. Does it print a VVPB? nt

nt

[seriousstan]

4. Yes, it records every action you took for you to see.

Including canceling a choice and chosing another canddidate.

[Eric J in MN]

7. What happens to the paper when the polls close? nt

nt

[seriousstan]

9. It is in a sealed box that stays with the voting machine..

We print out three copies of the memory card and also remove the card. ! is posted for all to see and the other 2 are sent in with the card.

[Eric J in MN]

15. Is there a paper which just lists the voter's choices for the voter

to view through glass after voting?

[seriousstan]

16. It shows your every action

[Eric J in MN]

18. Is the paper behind glass? Can voters filip through it? nt

nt

[seriousstan]

20. It is displayed behind glass so you can see every action you did.

It recordsd every keystroke, canceled choice and final choice.

[Eric J in MN]

26. If poll workers tried to do count the paper, wouldn't it be time-consuming

to go through all that instead of a piece of paper with final choices?

[seriousstan]

27. The machine prints a total tally at the end of the day on a different

printer. The paper ballots are only there for voter review and recount purposes. The total tally is read from the memory card which we also remove at the end of the day and return to the main office. One tally sheet is immediately displayed for public inspection at the end of the day and the initial "zero reading" sheet is displayed at the beginning of the day for all to see.

[Eric J in MN]

28. In 2004, there was a problem of people touching "Kerry"

on touch-screens and then getting Bush.

Will voters literally touch the screens on these machines?

[seriousstan]

29. Yes, they are touch screen. I will be very interested in any problems

as the one you stated. The ability to see your choice on the paper printout should make that kind of error obvious. If there are any problems, we were instructed to call the main ofice and take the offending machine out of service.

[Eric J in MN]

30. Can you try out the machines before the polls open

to make sure people won't press one candidate's and have another selected?

[seriousstan]

31. If this happens it will be readily apparent. The printout won't match the

voter's choice. We aren't allowed to "play" with the machines before the election. First, there isn't enough time. Secondly, it is very important that the machines are not messed with. This is the reason we run a "zero tape printout" before the election to prove that the machines are at zero with no residual votes. These "zero tapes" are posted for public inspection at the opening of the polls.

[Eric J in MN]

32. Someone besides the company should test that touching

a candidate's name makes it recorded before the polls open on Election Day.

I'm surprised there isn't a TEST mode.

[seriousstan]

33. We practiced with the actual machines at training.

The machine prints a report about every action and button you pushed. The voter can review this tape during the voting procedure and the record is secured for any kind of review at a later date.

[Eric J in MN]

34. Did it accurately record whatever name you pressed during training? nt

nt

[seriousstan]

35. Yes, even when I removed a previous vote and changed my vote.

Every keystroke is clearly recorded and displayed.

[Eric J in MN]

36. Will the blind use those machines? nt

nt

[seriousstan]

37. There are headphones and braille buttons for the blind.

As always, the disabled are allowed to take anyone they wish in the booth with them to assist, except their employer or union rep or a candidate.

[Eric J in MN]

38. How do voters check the paper?

Is it behind glass? Is there a button to scroll it? Can they see who the person before them voted for?

[seriousstan]

40. It is behind glass and you cannot see others voting record.

I believe there is a method for scrolling your voting record, but I will have to call and ask to be sure. The viewing window is large enough to display more than enough tape to view your process.

[Eric J in MN]

41. Does the glass magnify, or is it normal glass? nt

nt

[SharonAnn]

42. "Test" mode performance proves nothing.

"Test" mode is a different mode that "live" mode, so it could be programmed quite differently from the actual program that is run on election day. Or, it could be the actual program but wouldn't run certain routines until it was in "production'.

[Botany]

5. I live in Columbus, OH

Do you really think that the vote will be clean?

Damnschroder is a fucking crook .... @ the very least he kept voting machines
locked up in 04. This kept thousands from voting.

Besides they can cheat @ the central tabulator level.

[seriousstan]

6. I do but it will take a few minutes more to vote.

There will be a few more qestions than usual.

[Botany]

8. Please!

EES & Diebold are owned by brothers and funded by the Christian Right.

I worked the 04 vote and saw & heard fraud 1st hand. HB 3 codifies vote fraud
in Ohio.

The repugs right now are working 24/7 to rig the fall vote.

Our problem was we were ready for Florida 2000 and "they" had
moved on ..... in 06 we will be ready for an 04 problem.

BTW the new person on the Franklin County BOE .... Denny White was
ex chair of the Ohio Dems ..... he has never passed the smell test to me.


http://www.electionfraud2004.org/presentation/index.html

slide # 5

[seriousstan]

10. What was your position and what frad did you see? Did you report

it? Did you try to stop it? I am very interested.

[Botany]

11. i was an poll watcher.

I saw the republican challenger working with the precinct capt. and others
when ever I left the room .... she was sitting @ the table with them ... going
over voter lists .... I caught her 3 times ... I finally had to sit 3 feet behind her chair
fro the last 3 hours to keep her from working with the precinct people.

At the end of the day one of the voting machines "went down" as they were closing
it out. When I got the data from that machine ... 3 days later it read 42% bush
all other machines (5 others .... 2 precincts voting in the same place) had 29 to 31%
bush vote .... it had the lowest numerical count of votes in it but had the highest #
of bush votes of all of the machines.

i had been in connect with Kerry HQ IT people all day ... @ 7:00 a good source told me
we had 300 + electoral votes .... exit polls showed us winning Florida, Iowa, Ohio,
Nevada, and New Mexico (we lost them all) so I let them I did not bitch too much ....
i figured @ the most they scammed 50 votes. The provisional ballots I don't know about
people were allowed to cast them ... if they counted I don't know.

I tried calling the election fraud hot line .... it was blocked by a very sophisticated scam
the block was gone with in 1 hour of Kerry conceding.



You might want to read this article too .... call Bob F. the data is legit
"they" also purged 308,000 voters from the roles prior to the 04 election.
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1832


I know it all seems "tin foil hat" crazy but it was dirty! Dammschroder and Blackwell met with
bush & Rove on election day in 04. Every time you see him remember he is a very evil man.
The #s and data from Franklin County and Statewide just does not make any sense other
than fraud .... I am in my 40s & college grad .... those fuckers stole it end of story.

[seriousstan]

12. So why didn't you mention any of this to the Dem poll workers?

There are Dem poll workers at every polling place. Why didn't they help you? Nobody gets away with shit where I work. I won't let them. What did the Dem workers say to you?

P.S. you should get some real dogs in the fight and become an election official. Then you have the power and the duty to stop what you may perceive as inaccuracies.

[Botany]

14. I was the dem poll worker.

My first time .... it was only afterwards that the level of corruption hit me.

Just remember "they" are working 24/7 to fix it again. HB 3 is part of it.

This time i guarantee plenty of machines and a paper trail but "they"
will not go down with out a fight.

think about Ohio 04 we have lost over 2.2 million jobs & registered @ least
350,000 new Kerry voters plus bush had a drop in from 2000 support
(look @ Murrow County the most red county in the state 68% bush vote in
2000 but a 60% bush vote in 2004 ..... we had a big Upper Arlington for Kerry
group .. Arlington is repug all the way) but still that idiot gets the biggest
turn out and vote total ever? It makes no sense.

Every glitch and every voter anomaly favored bush ..... a mathematical impossibility.
google the Sec. of State's web site and look @ the 2004 vote ....
Lucas County (home of Tom Noe & his wife head of the BOE there) 20,000 people
went and voted for a liberal dem for congress but did not vote for president?
19 counties .... an unknown underfunded liberal black women running for
state supreme court got more votes than Kerry?
Claremont County .... every precinct went to bush ... including the ones that
went to Gore in 2000 .... including ones that blacks were the majority of the voter.
Miami county 19,000 votes loaded after the polls closed and the machines were
turned off ....

sorry to rant .... this shit eats me up.

http://www.thousandreasons.org/get_article.php?article_id=13 my story short form

[seriousstan]

21. You stated that you were a poll watcher, I am talking about an judge.

These are the people taking signatures and handing out permission to vote slip and putting you in the booth. Why didn't you bring your concerns to the Dem poll officials working at the time?

[alfredo]

13. OUr voting machines are cuter. They look like big

PDA's.



We have our voting machine training today. We're using the Hart eSlate. It's far from perfect, but the state only gave us three choices, and one company is in bad financial trouble, the other was ES&S. it was pretty much eSlate by default.

the training took two hours. I tried to pin them down on the VVPB, but they said it wasn't feasible. At the end they gave us a DVD of the instructions to take home.
that was nice, but I was hoping for a puppy.

[seriousstan]

17. I have a dvd also. Ours have a very accurate record of our every button

push. That is why they rnout of paper after 80 voters and we must replace them after 65.

[alfredo]

19. Ours will have to have extra paper too. I did notice some

things counter intuitive about the machines from the election official side of the machine. Canceling the vote has the word cancel that appears near the end of the process. It doesn't get pushed, but it appears to be the logical thing to do. You have to go to the machine to finish the process.

[Virginian]

22. a puppy !

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[alfredo]

24. I can dream can't I?

[Kablooie]

23. In my state they have a red cable connected directly to the white house!

[Virginian]

25. Thanks for being a part of the process.

It isn't just the machines that can be the problem. If there aren't enough Dem Election officers, it could be the process that is hacked.

We have poll watchers and we have election officers at the polls. The election officers are paid by the county electoral board for one day of work and are required to be there from setup to cleanup without leaving the polling place. The watchers are volunteers representing a party who can come and go as they please.
Outside the polls, we have people handing out campaign literature and other people taking exit polls. They can all be called poll workers. It is a catch-all term.

My first time as an Election Officer was Nov 2000. It was chaos. The lines were long and most of us in charge were inexperienced. We had problems and we had vote discrepancies of more votes than voters. It was an exhausting day. When I got home, my husband told me Gore had won. Then the TV news told me the results were not yet conclusive. I stayed up all night waiting for Florida to turn blue on Tim Russert's election map. Then there were the angry mobs of Republican staffers trying to prevent the recount process from playing out. Then stories of the Butterfly ballot in Palm Beach that was not easy to punch without a magnifying glass. There were more stories of people showing up to vote only to find themselves purged for having a name similar to a criminal. and more...

It was quite an initiation election. The problems we had were microscopic compared to other regions. I later became Chief Election Officer for my precinct. My purpose for living on election day is to run a FAIR election.

In 2004, we had a massive turnout. One of our machines went down. I wanted to go home and hide under my water bed. At the busiest time of day, we had nearly a thousand people in line. I had to ask my election officers at the pollbooks to slow down because we had no more room for the line waiting to use the machines.
There was another precinct in the same building with shorter lines. I was so afraid that some of our voters who had already checked-in would go over there and vote on their machines. We have a method to prevent that, but the other precinct had ignored that part of the process.
The lines were long and there were all kinds of distractions and problems throughout the day. Two voters who had checked in shortly after the polls opened, needed to catch a flight and asked if they could vote on our provisional ballots. We let them.
Many of the voters said they had changed their voting address at DMV when they changed their drivers license address. We had to send them to their old precincts because they weren't on our pollbooks. One fellow registered a day after the registration deadline. I was so sorry to have to turn him away, but he hadn't made it onto the pollbook. Whenever a person was not on our pollbooks, we had to call the county registrar to find out where they were registered. The registrar could even tell if the voter was registered out of state. I don't know if that one lady made it to her old precinct in New Jersey that day.
After noon, the lines let up a little and we made another kink in our snaked line to accommodate the after work crowd. We didn't need it. We had peaked at around 10:30 am. We hardly had anyone waiting when the polls closed.

There was a volunteer who brought in voters from the senior housing down the street. I asked her to bring them around 3:30 when the line was light so they wouldn't have to wait so long. There were other seniors (or people with canes or crutches) who came in at the busy time. I brought them to the front of the line to check in and then took them to some chairs I had set up by the voting machines. I was told later by the election board that I wasn't supposed to do that. No one complained about it that I knew of.

Someone came up to me while I was trying to resolve about four other voter problems and said they had a missing child. I referred her to the school office. Word to parents -- If you bring your children to the polls, don't expect the election officers to babysit for you. We have more than enough to do. I wanted to put up a sign saying, "Unattended children will be fed to the dragon in the dungeon." but thought maybe I shouldn't.
One man complained about how the pollbooks were split. Each section had about the same number of names, it just so happened that a lot of people with a last name starting with "H" came in at the same time. I let him complain, even gave him a form to make an official complaint to the state electoral board. I didn't, however, take him over to the other precinct in the building and show him that their books contained 2/3 the number of voters and that they had the same number of machines. Maybe I should have. Then he would have had a valid complaint.

We did not have press coverage inside the precinct, but we did have foreign election observers and of course, we had poll watchers from both parties. I was compemented on my professionalism by poll watchers from both parties.

At the end of the day, I got the biggest thrill of the day when I learned the number of voters checking in at the pollbooks exactly matched the number of votes on the machines. My team ran a successful election in spite of all the problems in processing about three thousand voters.

Oh, and our precinct went for Kerry, too. I tried not to show partisian leanings, but I may have allowed my Dem Election Officers to cheer too long when I announced the results. I'll have to limit the celebration of the results to 30 seconds or something the next time.

Working the polls keeps you from stressing out over exit polls. I never knew Kerry was ahead in the exit polls until I read it here on DU.

[guidod]

39. Will it scratch

your nuts?