What is wrong with the "lever" voting machines?

[sweetheart]

I've been reading about these things, and it seems they're more
accurate and less prone to errors than later technologies. Why has
election technology been shifting towards less accuracy?

Example, mechanical controls prevented overvoting entirely on the
old mechanical systems, plus no central tabulator fraud. No reverse
tabulation, no counting backwards.

It does appear, that outside of true-vote, the newest voting
technologies are more fraudulent than the older ones. What is going
on. Are we collectively insane?

Some details on voting technology:
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa111300b.htm

[AwakeAtLast]

1. They worked. Correctly. That was the problem. eom

[noamnety]

2. just file down a couple of gear teeth

and the levers will skip votes for undesirable candidates.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. They're too difficult to scam

Sorry -- they were built to deliver reliable vote counts, and not be subject to clandestine tampering.

They were from the 1960s and 1970s, when hippies ruled the Earth. But Jeebus and Diebold will put things right again.

--bkl

[PATRICK]

4. You can cheat on anything

with a privacy barrier. You can be intimidated whenever there is no absolute privacy. There is no perfection in any event anywhere, but when anything becomes "acceptable" not routinely checked and observed, fraud will develop.

On the other hand "improvements" or the inevitability of any machines being "unsatisfactory" can be gamed to selling a phony new fraud of which BBV is a classic for all times. You will note in these cases they hate to breathe the word fraud or party involvement in ANY of their sales presentations. That is a bad sign from the getgo. This nation is a conman's paradise.


UNTIL the online voting gets through. ONLY the objections of soldiers themselves prevented 100,000 test votes via this hairiest of all scams.

Read www.electionline.org and prepare to be horrified by the sell.

Levers can be shaved. Simple inspection of the machine works caught this
once. Other ways that people refuse to spread around they are so easy, being mechanical.

[sweetheart]

11. local and global fraud

So if i understand your properly, because the machines record the
vote numbers on wheels at the back, that someone could check after
each voter and that voter privacy was violated in some cases.

As well, people with access to the internals, learned how to fiddle
the gears to manipulate results on individual machines.

That said, mechanical systems are local, and to fiddle a whole
election involves such a broad base of corruption, that corruption
on the scale we just observed was virtually impossible.

What are your thoughts on true-vote? I think it is the poll position
of real voting technology today, however, i am still deeply suspicious
of technology that is not local, as global fraud is simply too easy
from above... and even if indiviuals have receipts, how does one
verify the overall tabulation if the fraudsters have been at it?

[2Design]

5. I liked them - easier to vote the party line too

[Castilleja]

9. I always like those machines

much better, myself.

[demodonkey]

6. They work FINE.

We have had them in my precinct (I am a pollworker for over 10 years) ever since I began to vote at age 18. They are completely mechanical, and other than physically taking one apart and changing or tampering with the odometers (yes that is how they record votes) a lever machine would be pretty much impossible to hack.

Sadly they are no longer being manufactured and those areas that have them have to canibalize some of the machines they have to get parts to keep others going. And, thanks to HAVA, I guess they are outlawed as of next year?

Lever machines, if put back into manufacture, and ESPECIALLY if fitted with a printer (some are, some are not) would be an EXCELLENT way to go instead of the black boxes, IMHO.

[PATRICK]

8. In NY what I was told

by the town. "There are no spare parts. There is no company making them. HAVA will be forcing them to change anyway."

The Sate legislature is supposedly going to toe the line on the paper trail. It is a back against the wall for lobbyist loving fat cats and diehard incumbents who are hard to trust with this issue.

[sweetheart]

13. Its really pathetic that we can't make mechanical machines anymore

You'd think the great USA economy would find a little place to still
be able to make a gear or two... I'm just a bit skeptical when i
hear such crapola... not from y'all.. but it sounds a bit suspicious,
no?

Why can't we fix some gears and update the mechanics using the last
50 years.... instead of ditching them for something that patently is
fraud-inclined.

Luddites are conservative last time i checked... so who the heck is
changing out quality for fraud? I'm flumoxed, flabberghasted and
generally aghast at what i hear in this voting machines evolution...
the race to the bottom seems to be the republican way in more than
economics.

[LiberalFighter]

14. It actually printed out the results a different way

Sheets were in the back and imprinted when the machines were finished.

I got a copy after an election back around 1988 or 89. It was about 4 feet x 6 feet or so.

[T Bone]

7. Qtips and toothpicks, that's what

I had it explained to me once that these were riggable to produce opposite results, or unregistered votes, for a while with q-tips and toothpicks placed correctly in the mechanics of the machine. The explanation I heard was that it was possible to rig the machine with qtips and/or toothpicks in such a way that , for a while at the beginning of voting, certain votes wouldn't register until the qtips or toothpicks broke or flexed to a point that the intended effect ceased. Undetectable except for the one mechanic at the warehouse who had ultimate access to the very inner works of the machine.

That's what I have heard is possible with those. (?)

[Cobalt Violet]

10. this was the 1st time I didn't vote by lever.

And it just didn't feel right to vote using opitical scan.

[Lugnut]

12. Our lever machines

Here in Luzerne Co PA are being junked so they can replace them with electronic machines of some sort. :mad:

[AP]

15. No paper trail. But I'd be happy with the computer equivalent: a optical..

...scan reader with NO software (all hardware) which reads a paper ballot which is retained, or a software-less electronic printer/counter which retains the printed ballot.