Votes for Obama Switching to McCain in Early Voting in Jackson County
UPDATE: Now Putnam County, WV Reports Votes Flipping D to R as Well...
Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
Here we go again. Completely unverifiable touch-screen voting machines, in this case, made by ES, flipping votes from one candidate to another. Yet again. From the Saturday Gazette-Mail...
Some early W.Va. voters angry over switched votes
Jackson County touch-screens switched votes, 3 residents say
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching
their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.
"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John
McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.
...
Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same
problem.
"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went
to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it
jumped again.
"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the
Republican," Thomas said.
...
"Jackson County is a Republican county. I am a registered Republican, but I have been voting Democrat since the 1990s."
Thomas, who brought his daughter with him to the polls, said she had the same problem.
More at the original story. See HDNet's stunning, and almost completely ignored, 2007 exposé "The Trouble With Touchscreens" (includes video) for more details on the failed quality control and verified reports of vote-flipping on touch-screen
machines made by ES, the world's largest supplier of voting systems.
LATE UPDATE: And now Putnam County, WV voters are also reporting votes flipping from Democratic to Republican on ES touch-screens as well. Details here...
*************
ENDS
-- John Gideon Co-Executive Director VotersUnite.Org www.votersunite.org
"To encourage citizen ownership of transparent, participatory democracy." The Creekside Declaration March 22, 2008