Reply #99: Are you choosing argumentum ad hominem?

[slackmaster]

I'm not sure why you would do that in this forum, in this context. We're supposed to be friends by default here. I'm just offering my personal opinion. My desire is for the truth to come out, and that is much more important to me than who wins one election or another. The most important aspect of this is for the citizens of a democracy to justifiably have confidence in the integrity of our election systems. Clearly there is a problem here. It will never be possible for everybody to be happy with the outcome of every election, but what we have now is wide open for endless accusations of fraud and conspiracy. The core flaw IMO is that there seems to be no way to either prove or disprove those allegations.

I'm 48 years old. I have been working with data processing systems as a professional for more than 23 years. During that time I've seen and diagnosed and fixed a lot of problems; and the ones I couldn't fix I documented and escalated to someone who could or someone who had the authority to decide which ones were worth fixing. Most reported data processing problems caused by human error or misunderstanding, some are caused by hardware malfunctions (which often have a component of human error), and a very small number are caused by intentional, malicious actions by humans.

I don't dispute in any way what you say you saw. I fully believe that you had some voters who say they voted a straight Democratic ticket, but the system switched their ballots to a straight Republican ticket. That could be caused by many different processes. I won't even start to enumerate the ways I can imagine that happening. It would take days. But the questions I ask as a systems analyst would be along the lines of:

1. How many times has this happened?

2. Can we make it happen under controlled conditions? If so, with what freqency? The answer to that would lead to higher level questions, e.g. is this enough of a problem to have materially altered the outcome of the election?

3. Has someone ever complained of voting straight Republican only to have all the votes switched to Democratic, and how often has that happened? Can we make that happen under controlled conditions, etc.

It's obvious to me that you saw something strange happen. It's not at all clear that your experience is indicative of a fatal systemic flaw or vast conspiracy to steal an election. You are one of a very small number of people who have given me first person accounts of a glitch with an electronic voting system. Think about people who might have seen their Republican votes switch to Democratic. If their guy wins the election, they would be far less motivated to complain about it afterward than someone whose candidate lost.

I urge anyone interested in this topic to ask yourself this question: What is more important to you, having your candidate win or having the truth come out? My point is that if your mindset is proper, you should be prepared and willing to accept and live with an answer you don't personally like.