Reply #38: I agree with your points about skepticism, and wish Madsen

[s-cubed]

were not going to be at the Conyers forum.

If I were interested in fixing an election, I'd have a variety of tactics, in part because there are a variety of machines out there.

I would want to try to do something to the touch screens w/ no paper trail. The fact that the repugs refused to insist on machines with paper trails leads me to think that was part of the strategy. From what we've learned so far, technicians had almost free access to machines to install "updates", so they wouldn't have to be in on the fix, and we know the certification is a joke. Also, the many reports of votes on touch screens jumping from Kerry to Bush sounds like a buggy program.

I'd also want to fix the optical scanners and punch card readers. Anything like that can have "calibration" problems, which would lead to large numbers of undervotes in certain areas.

But then I'd also want to do something at the tabulating machine level. Question for those more knowledgable: how many levels are we talking about for tabulating machines: county, or only at state level? Tabulating machine level is the only way I could be assured of really being able to fine tune the results to what I wanted. And that seems consistent with the exit poll anomolies.

Someone, here or elsewhere, raised the question of the feeds to AP on election night. If all the states are feeding into the AP, is it possible that some talented hacker could go the opposite direction and tamper with the machines reporting the data? Could a virus like program be spread to all tabularing programs making it easy to get to the data & change it?

Continue to question, don't dismiss Curtis out of hand, but also don't focus solely on touch screens as the point of the fix. I think there were mutiple hacks, just as there were multiple tactics to suppress the vote.