The reality about "vote flipping" machines in NC and elsewhere

[Kelvin Mace]

175. When I pursued this issue

I was more concerned about software bugs screwing up elections than dodgy election officials. In fact, it was precisely that kind of situation that prompted the NC state government to overhaul its election laws to cover digital voting. A voting machine used in early voting on the coast ran out of memory at some point in the process. The error was signaled by a cryptic alphanumeric code on a tiny LCD screen on the back of the machine. When the machine ran out of memory, it simply overwrote the last ballot with the next one entered, thus over 4,000 votes were lost. Since there was no paper record of the vote, there was no way to recover the votes. This lead to the appointment of a select committee (which I served on) to investigated the problem and the drafting legislation to prevent that, and other similar errors, from happening in the future. It also created laws requiring code certification and random auditing of paper versus digital counts.

We still have to get laws like these in all 50 states, but the threat of an election being "stolen" by election machine jiggery-pockery is very small next to the "legal" suppression efforts which are far more effective.