Stories like this are just pouring gasoline on a fire:
The [Maryland Republican] party said Tuesday that it has received complaints from about 50 voters in 12 Maryland counties who say machines at early voting centers “flipped” their Republican votes to count toward Democratic candidates.
Marsha Epstein of Pikesville said she ran into the problem when she went to vote at the Reisterstown Senior Center’s Hannah More campus. She said she tried to vote for Republican Larry Hogan for governor but the machine recorded a vote for Democrat Anthony G. Brown.
Epstein said she pointed out the problem to an election judge, who told her to try again.
“I had to do it three times to keep it on Hogan,” Epstein said. She said she had no problems voting in the other races on the ballot. Voters from Howard and Harford counties called The Baltimore Sun to report similar problems.
William Childers of Havre de Grace said something similar happened to him when he cast his ballot Sunday at the Higher Education and Technology Center in Aberdeen. He said his vote for Hogan registered without a problem but when he tried to vote to re-elect Republican Rep. Andy Harris, that line lit up temporarily but then switched to Democratic challenger Bill Tilghman.
Maryland Democratic Party spokesman Jared Smith and Brown campaign manager Justin Schall said they were not aware of any similar concerns being raised by voters on their side.
I’ll bet.
State elections board officials said they had received reports that fewer than 20 machines statewide had displayed votes for candidates other than the ones the voters selected. Deputy administrator Nikki Baines Charlson said 12 had been tested and no problems had been found.
“These units are back in service because they couldn’t replicate it no matter how hard they tried,” Charlson said.
Another five were not tested because there was only one reported problem, she said. In three cases, Charlson said, machines were removed from service because of calibration problems — the place a voter touched did not line up with their intended votes.
As for the machines with only one reported problem . . . if there is a calibration error — and we’re assuming it’s only a “calibration error” — how can the elections-board officials know if other people had the same thing occur to their vote and didn’t notice?
But relax, Republicans. We’re only hearing stories about this happening in Maryland. And Illinois.
In this case, all turned out well for Jim Moynihan, who is running for State Representative in the 56th District.
Moynihan alerted an election judge and was allowed to cast a correct ballot on the first day of early voting in Illinois.
“He did what he is supposed to do by contacting the election judge,” said Cook County Clerk spokeswoman Courtney Greve.
The machine was taken out of service and Moynihan’s initial Democratic votes were never registered.
The issue is hardly widespread, with only 5 out 35,000 voters in suburban Cook County so far experiencing any issue, Greve said.
Again, even if the reports of machines switching votes are rare, how many are noticing? And elsewhere in Illinois:
Rock Island County Clerk Karen Kinney addressed concerns about her handling of absentee ballots after a judge ruled in her favor Monday.
Kinney’s office has been the target of a Republican Party attack that not only is she opening ballots early and counting them but that her voting machines are calibrated in such a way that switches votes from Republican to Democrat.
Rock Island County Circuit Judge Lori Lefstein denied the GOP’s emergency injunction on the counting of absentee ballots.
“There is nothing wrong in this office,” Kinney, a Democrat, said afterward.
Republican Bobby Schilling’s spokesman Jon Schweppe said he heard from 20 voters last week who tried to vote for a Republican when the Democratic choice was selected on the machine’s touch screen. Schilling is running against Democratic incumbent U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos.
Dave Weigel makes the argument this is not as nefarious as some believe:
Like every vote-rigging story, this led to a bureaucrat huffing about a “calibration error.” Occam’s razor: That’s what it is. If you’re going to rig a machine — and, for the record, you should not — you will not rig it to reveal its trickery while the voter is still watching. NBC’s briefly popular Heroes made this clear, revealing the wisdom of vote-rigging after the voters have left and the machines can be tampered with, preferably through the use of undetectable powers.
When will voters stop worrying about partisan forces stealing their elections? Likely never. Conspiracy theory research is clear about this; trust in the “establishment” is low, trust in government is lower, and voters are very willing to believe the worst about the people who want to run them. Until their candidates win. Then the election was probably fair.
I’d just note that recent experience tells us that it’s not unthinkable for government officials to behave in simultaneously malicious and incompetent manners.