US voting machines flipping results
THE US PRESIDENTIAL election is something we all grit out teeth and hope doesn’t go wrong – yet apparently, the machines used to vote could be recording the wrong candidate.
That’s right, the machines which a third of voters will be using are touch screen and thus have room for error.
Voters are confronted with a simple interface which shows them coloured areas on the screen - votes are cast by pressing this screen.
The problem encountered with this equipment was that it appeared to be " flipping" the votes made from one choice to another – in some cases it changed the vote from a Republican one to a Democratic one.
The complaints began rolling in from West Virginia and have since been reported in Colorado, Tennessee and Texas.
Since these reports have been made, voting watchdog organisations have been working to warn others of this problem with advisory letters going out to 16 secretaries of state last week alone.
However, although at first this may seem to the innocent reader as a technical flaw, since a report was issued last month by Princeton University on this matter – it seems increasingly likely that the machines had been knobbled.
The university’s centre for Information Technology found that the touch-screen machines could be easily tampered with, for instance replacing a machine’s memory chip with one capable of changing results – professor Andrew Appel reckons this could be done in seven minutes.
Sequoia Voting Systems the company which produced these machines claims that there is nothing wrong with the technology, furthering stating that New Jersey election officials expressed complete confidence in the security of the machines.
Some places, such as Florida, are sticking to optical scan voting which means marked paper ballots being fed into a scanner. µ
L'Inq
The Times
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Wouldn't it be just consistent to have voting machines flipping results in a country where you have only two parties, which manage to suppress all alternatives, and where the two parties split electoral districts to maintain parity?
West Virginia voters have been complaining about this for some time and it has been in the news. It first started when 3 voters had their vote switched from Obama to McCain.

The company says it's a calibration problem. Which means they probably picked the cheapest patent they could find to implement the touch-screen. (How often does your local touch screen ATM do this to you?)
To read this AGAIN after the last two elections makes me despair. When the same inept things keep happening it's not surprising people think there is a deliberate ploy to the events. I hope this time around there isn't too much flipping but I reckon we've seen it all since 2001, anything is possible!
We have AVC "Edge" machines in our precincts. They come with a sealed printer that prints votes on a cassette of paper. The printout is about the width of a cash register receipt and it appears through a window to the left of the screen. You get to see the printout before hitting your 'vote'; the printout is then scrolled away to ensure privacy. Each vote print has a 2D barcode check pattern printed with it -- I'm not sure how its used because we don't touch the printers (if they need changing out then someone from the elections office has to drive over and do it).

I've looked closely at these machines (I run a Precinct) and I can't see an easy way for the results to be fiddled, much less a way to do it without being detected. This suggests that those machines that have problems -- the Diebolds are the ones that get fingered the most -- are either built by grossly incompetent engineers or they're designed to be fiddled. Either way the complaints are justified.

Incidentally, the Edge machines have numerous seals to protect their internals. Each seal has a serial number that has to be checked against a master list. Everything has to be sealed and all seals accounted for. I think they're Ok, but even so nearly everyone prefers to use the Optech Insight card readers -- they count, they keep an audit log and the voting cards are managed and accounted for. We do try.
Not Super Mario, Agin!
I can think of dozens of touchscreen devices that never need calibration - never ever seen it needed - those claims are bullsh** for either the most pathologically incompetent electronics engineering you ever saw or the secret backdoor code designed to rig the election is misfiring and showing itself. 
This is all part of the plan. Mark my words McCain will win despite not getting the votes. This election is fixed, and when it's eventually questioned that the election was fixed by hacked voting machines the can point out these flip flop errors.
In Santa Clara County, California (which includes most of what people think of as Silicon Valley), touch screens were used for a number of years but have been dumped in favor of optical scan. To vote, you draw a line on the paper ballot connecting two large black blocks - pretty difficult to screw up - it's like making an "X" in a box, only with one less line. Why use a complex, vulnerable technology when a simpler one will do?