A bit confused by the paper trail

[Grooner Five]

This is from Diebold's Election Servies website, under FAQ's:

http://www6.diebold.com/dieboldes/faq.htm

Q: How do I know my cast ballot is safe and secure?

A: When a voter casts their ballot using the Diebold touch screen system, the ballot selections are immediately encrypted and stored in multiple locations within the voting station. When stored, the order of cast ballots is scrambled to further insure ballot anonymity. The image of each and every ballot cast on the voting station is captured, and can be anonymously reproduced on standard paper should a hard copy of ballots be required for recount purposes. Once voting concludes at a precinct, a printed election results report is printed as a permanent record of all activity at each voting station. This printed record is used to audit the electronic tabulation of votes conducted during the election canvas process, when final, official election results are reported.

I had heard and accepted that there is no paper trail on these machines, as if there were no means of verifying a vote or taking accurate counts of all the folks who voted in a precinct. When I voted in Florida this year, my name was manually checked off of a control sheet of registered voters in my precinct, which presumably gave a hard count of the number of voters. If the Diebold machines show the same number of voters, I don't see any room for fraud.

What am I missing here?

[NVMojo]

1. the point is that they don't check or cross check the logs with the

printed copy unless challenged. That is how 271 uncounted votes were found on 3 machines two weeks ago in my county in Nevada. When pressured to give totals for each precinct from the election, before they were given to me, they crossed checked ....votes missing ...checked the cartridges, there they were. It's to hard to unroll those printed rolls on the paper trailed sequoias to do a cross check ...

[NVMojo]

2. sorry

i don't know why it posted twice ...

[Grooner Five]

3. That surprises me

I would have thought that rectifying the counts would be a precint manager's SOP before reporting to the state supervisor of elections, and am even a bit skeptical that it isn't. But if not, shouldn't the Democrat precints start doing this as a rule, thus pressuring it in to becoming policy across the board?

[pauldp]

4. What they don't say is..

sometimes the ballot selections are immediately switched via our secret proprietary software to reflect the guy we like and "then encrypted and stored in multiple locations within the voting station."

[Andy_Stephenson]

5. Yep

your exactly right on that.

It what they don't say that matters most.

[Grooner Five]

6. But that would pose an incredible risk to Diebold

If they were caught - and it appears a method to catch them is built right in to the machines - the scandal would drive the company out of business, and place the management in the middle of an incredible scandle that could possibly see them convicted of treason.

How do the benefits of having a Republican in the White House outweigh the risks of a destroyed comppany and the distinct possibility of jailtime? I don't see rational people reaching a conclusion to perpetrate fruad, especially when the machines are ultimately capable of proving it. Honestly, how much can they really gain from a Bush Administration? The folks who would be making this conspiracy are already very wealthy and succesful, and have much to lose.

I will admit that I am averse to believing this election was illegitimate, and want to maintain faith and trust in my country. But that bias is not affecting what I see as common sense. Diebold would be idiots to risk what they're being accused of.

[Andy_Stephenson]

13. The machines are designed for fraud.

I know...I have the software right here at home. You can have anyresult you want...all you need is built right in.

The machines were designed for fraud. The sloppiness with which they were designed opens the door for it.

[Bill Bored]

7. What you are missing

Assuming the ballot is anonymous, there is no way for you to know whether the machine allocated your vote to the candidate of your choice. The printout described above is just a paper copy of what's in the machine's memory. If the machine changed your vote, how would you know? How would a recount determine if the machines changed votes? The recount would be the same as the machine count because the ballots are printouts of what's already in the machine.

The voter-verified paper trail, which was prevented from even coming to a vote in the House by Hastert and Delay, would have mandated that you the voter receive a paper ballot showing you how you voted. The ballots are then deposited and kept by the election officials in the event a recount is required. In that case, the paper ballots, which the voters have confirmed printed their intended votes would be counted -- not what's in the machines.

There is still the issue of how state laws determine when to recount and how this might be triggered if there were machine fraud, but at least the paper trail would allow for a true manual recount of the votes that the voters confirmed they intended.

Get it, or am I missing something? :-)

Edited to use the "ballot" in lieu of "receipt."

[eridani]

8. Yes. It's a BALLOT, not a RECEIPT

Otherwise you are spot on. Calling it the ballot emphasizes that the paper ballot should be the legal ballot for purposes of recount, not the machine data.

[Grooner Five]

9. Sure, I get what you are saying

but I just don't see why Diebold would risk the destruction of their company, let alone serious criminal charges against their management. The conspriacy you are suggesting would have to be perpetrated on a very wide scale, and would have to show patterns in-line with previous vote tallies from pre-electronic elections. That would require a different code for almost every precinct in the country.

But using common sense, what's in it for them, considering the (pre-Bush) global success of their company?

[pauldp]

10. What are they risking?

Their source code is secret. All kinds of shit could go on in that code. The only way to really verify if what is in the machine is what the voter intended is to produce a paper trail that is checked by the voter before it is dropped in a ballot box. With no open source code and no voter verified ballot they don't risk anything.

We are talking about convicted felons here. Diebold is organized crime.

[bj2110]

11. Why are they risking getting caught? hmmm.... ...

... well

how should i say this...

M
O
N
E
Y


Dollars, cents, bling, dinero, cash... you get it.

Do you have any idea how successfuly these companies are?

On a secondary level.... power.....

Did you know that the husband of the Pinellas Co. Florida Sup of Elections is a former high level employees of one of these companies? Why would they risk it? So they can get people that they trust hand-picked by the governer (prez's brother) to run the governmental process to which they provide the equipment. Kind of an on-going cycle. Get it now?

[bj2110]

12. And for an explanation of how the code does not have to be different...

... for every precinct, see the Curtis affidavit. The trigger would have to change for every precinct. Hmmm... maybe that's why the vote machine companies send "technicians" to "calibrate" and "maintain" specific machines all over the country. See the current Ohio recount, specifically the Eaton affidavit.

[Georgia_Dem]

15. The fraud did happen. And yes, Diebold and other companies risked it.

I knew this might happen back as far as the few weeks leading up to the election. It's been documented in the independent news sites (including the weekly "Top 10 Conservative Idiots" from this very site), though not reported by the mainstream media. There, we found out about voter registrations getting torn up and early votes being switched. I know it might seem absurd, yet the writing's on the wall.

Is there risk? Sure. I read somewhere about some Republican officials getting arrested because of fraud. But I don't think the risk was on the Diebold higher-ups. Yeah, if caught, they'd get taken
to trial. But as their movie counterparts like to say, "there's ways around that." Sure, the election would be challenged, and there'd be nothing they could do about it, but those fat cats have shown time and time again that they can get out of these things easily. Between expensive lawyers, called-in favors, bribes, and fall guys, they'd have little to worry about. Thank you, "fair and impartial" justice system!

[Bill Bored]

14. Consider Enron

Look at what those guys did. What were they risking? Plenty! But the did it anyway. Now consider some folks with the same sort of mindset as those Enron traders who laughed as the power went off in CA. And they LOVED Bush! There are tapes of them joking about all this. Part of the evidence against them. Now picture the same sort of people making uh, let's say voting machines. And besides, Diebold needn't be so directly involved. All they needed to do was to leave a back door for the hackers.

Now personally, I've been playing Devil's advocate about this with some on this forum and I'm not totally convinced of it all myself. But Ohio is a disgrace and we know what else people are capable of, so...