http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5916 On Tuesday night, you will be told who the winner of the Pennsylvania Primary is. You will accept it. You will have no choice. No matter who the winner really is. Or isn't. This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."
Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters. With or without a so-called "paper trail" printer, all touch-screen/push-button/DRE voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.
So, as with South Carolina's primary, so so long ago, and other states since, whatever the officials tell you at the end of the election is what you, and we, will have to accept. Whether votes are counted accurately is completely out of anyone's hands at this point. It's strictly Democracy of the Gods...But whether folks gets to cast their vote at all is a different matter, and certainly worth watching closely. Back in South Carolina, in the dark days of January 19, 2008, machines wouldn't fire up at all for much of the day in at least one county during the Republican Primary. The meltdown led to voters scrambling for any scrap of paper they could find to vote on, including, reportedly, paper towels. For the Democratic Primary the following week in South Carolina, voters were encouraged to print out their own ballots at home, and bring them to the polls...just in case.
Marybeth Kuznik, of the election integrity organization VotePA, has additional concerns. Even if the machines boot-up and "work" as expected, she worries there may not be enough of them to serve the voters. The result may be long lines and voters turned away, a la J. Kenneth Blackwell's disgraceful 2004 Ohio general election. Kuznik sent us the following thoughts on that issue over the weekend, after doing some quick math...I crunched the numbers and assuming we hit 70% turnout (very possible, because everybody and his uncle intends to vote in this) my own polling place is likely to be short on machines to the extent that we will be one to three hours over capacity (in terms of voters per machine time.) And that assumes that each voter takes only three minutes and they come in nice orderly even fashion evenly over the entire voting day, which they won't. Most come in the morning and after work. If it becomes a madhouse, meltdown, or a marathon either people will leave, or we are going to have lines reminiscent of Ohio 2004. Our SOS is no Blackwell, but the whole state of Pennsylvania is in total Denial about how bad these machines can be.
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