Wisconsin aftermath: Voters in disbelief over Walker victory

[mojowork_n]

35. That's the 64 bazillion dollar question, the extent to which

the bureaucratic machinery has been politicized. Who made the purchase recommendations
and who approved buying all those touchscreen voting machines? Are they compliant with the
GAB's guidelines (?) and/or requirements (?) for voting recording equipment?

Who was it that decided which voting machines would go where, and how many there would be per polling location. Is the information about equipment used, by county, at the GAB’s website really accurate and up-to-date?

Personally, I have some doubts that the Republicans big smoke-screen, the constant preoccupation about “who is entitled to step in to a voting booth,” hasn't maybe obscured an even more important question:

• What safeguards are in place to prevent someone from walking in to the polling location and
  electronically "flipping" many, many recorded votes? All from a safe distance.
  

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/30/researchers-hack-voting-machine-for-26/?test=latestnews

The electronic hacking tool consists of a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8. Together with the $15 remote control, which enabled the researchers to modify votes from up to a half-mile away, the whole hack runs about $26.

Two of the takeovers show the researchers controlling the buttons on the keypad despite what the "real" voter enters. But in what Warner called "probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering," the researchers were able to blank the e-voting machine's screen for a split-second after the "vote now" button was pressed. While the screen went dark, they remotely entered their own numbers into the DRE's keypad.

Johnston explained in the video: "When the voter hits the 'vote now' button to register his votes, we can blank the screen and then go back and vote differently and the voter will be unaware that this has happened."

Also -----> http://news.yahoo.com/researchers-hack-e-voting-machine-similar-2012-election-043305069.html


Not to say that there's any "proof" or even to suggest that we "believe" that this kind of vote theft ever occurred here, during last Tuesday's election, but has all the over-emphasis on protecting against a few individuals casting votes they shouldn’t be allowed to cast maybe taken away from any other attempts at oversight. Such as preventing dozens, hundreds, or thousands (or hundreds of thousands?) of votes from being switched? With the properly registered and legal voters who do cast legal ballots completely "unaware that this has happened."

If it would be like those magician's tricks where a distraction ("keep your eye on what the left hand is doing&quot helps the magician to pull off a sleight-of-hand trick with his "free" hand.

…….And on another subject, there's very little about the tabulation, or the vote-counting process, that inspires confidence.

The fact that we really know very little about the pertinent, operational details (would it be fair to say "next-to-nothing," if you consider the info that watchdogs and government departments have on the software programming (two ePROMs???), because it's all 'private and proprietary" -- that just begs the question, how politicized has the Wisconsin G.A.B. (Government Accountability Board) become?

Who was watching the watchers, and how involved in the process were political appointee's?

Why did someone feel it necessary to bring in the public relations experts for those “break-out sessions” with county clerks, to teach them to ‘take control’ of tough questions like they were all going to be interviewed on 60 Minutes?

What’s happened that’s made it less important to emphasize “transparency” in elections, and made “control” paramount?

The paragraph you cited in your post refers only to the 3,000 Command Central DRE touchscreen machines that were part of the “new lamps for old” swap of voting equipment with the county clerks in those 46 counties. Who are the programmers that were responsible for the code in all of the other voting machines that were used in the election? How many were there? How many computers (including Kathy Nickolaus’ world famous Windows 98 personal computer, that all Waukesha County votes are tabulated on (?) does it take to hold a state-wide election? Including optical scanning machines and also the computers that are used to assist clerks in tabulating paper ballots, in those counties that still have paper ballots, what kind of oversight exists? Have any of those folks ever had difficulties answering hypothetical questions online, about ethical behavior? Has anyone ever taken the time to ask? Those are all distinct and separate questions (or separate investigations) from looking in to the possibility that people were hacking votes from individual polling places, from up to half a mile away.

The bottom line seems pretty obvious. There are very good reasons that electronic voting has been abandoned in so many other countries. It just might be worth the time and trouble for people here to make an effort to see how safe and secure our own elections are, and whether or not the Republican drumbeat for “privatization,” in this case, has been penny-wise and bazillion dollar foolish.