Voting: have we forgotten that Texas voting machines were flipping votes to Ted Cruz?

[EveHammond13]

This is outrageous and everyone is just sitting around like it never happened.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/negayg/texas-voting-machines-have-been-a-known-problem-for-a-decade

Texas voters experiencing issues with voting machines used in that state have been told by election officials that they are the problem, not the machines. The state says voters are inadvertently touching the machines in ways they shouldn't, causing the machines to alter or delete their vote in the hotly contested senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke.

.....

The issue in the senate race has occurred when voters chose the option to vote a straight-party ticket—that is, to vote for only candidates from a specified party. Depending on whether the voter indicates they want to vote Democrat or Republican, the machine will automatically populate all races with candidates in the chosen party. But the multiple-page ballot can take several seconds to complete—in Houston the ballot runs 16 pages long. The Secretary of State and county election officials have blamed the issue on voters touching the machines while the systems are still rendering the ballot on screen—thereby inadvertently de-selecting their vote in the critical senate race. They say voters who touch the "enter" button while the system is still filling out the ballot can cause the machine to de-select their chosen candidate or change the vote to the other candidate in the race. ....

Leah McElrath, a freelance writer who specializes in political analysis, is one voter who experienced the problem in Houston. She waited 45 minutes in line to cast her ballot, she told Motherboard in a phone interview, and when she got to the machine, she selected the option to vote a straight-party Democratic ticket. She's positive the first page of the ballot then showed a vote cast for O'Rourke because when she saw the machine highlight his name, she says she did "a happy dance" in her head. But when she got to the review screen at the end of the ballot, she saw that the machine had given her vote to Cruz instead. McElrath says she did manually change some of her selections on the ballot to Republican candidates after the machine filled out her straight-party choices—something the machine allows voters to do—but insists she didn't do this in the senate race.

[ETStevens]

1. ONLY PAPER BALLOTS IN 202O!

We've got to get on this NOW!

[LonePirate]

2. He won by 215K votes. Were 108K votes flipped?

Yes, even if a single vote flipped, that's worth investigating. However, the chances that over 100,000 votes flipped due to a machine or software error are very, very unlikely.

[EveHammond13]

4. it's a multi-pronged attack - corrupt machines, Voter ID, long lines, reduced polling locations...

Texas wanted Beto.

[EveHammond13]

5. there are 15.6 million registered voters in Texas

[ehrnst]

7. Voter databases can be hacked, and their status changed.

That's hard to track, and it's easier to stop them at the check in than it is to flip a vote.

[RockRaven]

3. Paper ballots are not enough. Every precinct in the country ought to use HAND-MARKED paper ballots.

Very disturbingly, Pelosi's former chief of staff now works for a voting machine company, and Hoyer has sponsored legislation (that McConnell also sponsored in the Senate -- always a warning sign) which pushes fraud-enabling voting systems. All paper trails are not created equal. A stack of slips of paper generated by an electronic voting machine is not useful for an audit because the fraud can occur before/as the slip of paper is generated -- in which case the fraud is merely enshrined in the slip of paper made by the machine.

The Repukes might be the beneficiaries of this kind of election fraud and therefore its primary proponents, but Dem leadership is enabling it by either stupidity, corruption, lack of fortitude, or corruption.

[2naSalit]

6. Apparently.