Does anyone have any information on lever voting techology?

[ClintCooper2003]

I ask because lever voting is widely used in New York and Connecticut, where the exit polls were very far off from the tallied results.

[ClintCooper2003]

1. kick

[euler]

2. Have you not heard ?

http://www.alternet.org/story/20934

Much of the belief that the election was stolen was based on "screen shots" of raw numbers provided by CNN. In exit polling, raw numbers mean almost nothing – since the essence of a successful exit poll is to interview a sampling of voters, and then apply a variety of methods in order to adjust to the most probable accurate assessment. "To say you want the raw data is ludicrous," said the source. "You can't use it until you do something with it. You're talking about a bunch of naïve people that had the first course in statistics."

[ClintCooper2003]

6. I was asking about lever machines. There are no lever machines in Ohio.

[nodictators]

9. euler, your link goes to one of the worst articles I've ever read

BTW, your link had nothing that pertained to anything in this thread.

The author of the linked article, Russ Baker, asks ONE person about the lack of voting machines in Franklin County majority black precincts. Baker is given a happy-talk explanation. Baker, who seems to be totally ignorant of the misallocation of the voting machines in Franklin County, immediately concludes that there was no problem since "two individuals shared the task of allocating machines – and one was a Democrat."

But the real gem is this:

Charge: Voting company fraud
Finding: Unlikely
As for Diebold and other vilified companies, in all probability, they didn't, and wouldn't, risk the ignominy and consequences of fixing an election. The primary reason so many people are suspicious of Diebold in the first place is because of the CEO's ill-advised promise, in a GOP fundraising letter, to do everything he could to see Ohio's electors awarded to Bush. That was an outrageous thing to say, but even on its face more likely a sign of cluelessness than of hidden plans to alter the outcome.

[anaxarchos]

3. What are you looking for?

They are old (sometimes VERY old) mechanical machines. Because they are complicated and wear out (mechanically), they can be quite error prone.

What specifically is the issue?

[emcguffie]

4. you mean the old lever machines?

There's something on it in Bev's book, how to hack even those things. Well, not hack, but cheat. You just file off the tooth of a gear or something, and then that candidate will lose one out of every so many votes.

I think that happened to me, in NJ. It didn't feel right, there was no little click, like there usually is. And that is the ONLY type of voting machine I have ever used. So I missed that click. Didn't happen. I even turned the Kerry lever back and forth. No click. All the others clicked.

[MarkusQ]

5. Hacking lever machines is known art.

It has been happening for years. IIRC, one of the founders of Sequoia or ES&S was convicted of rigging an election in the 60's or 70's by tampering with a lever machine. There are several tricks, from the above mentioned gear filing to various "adjustments" that cause over or under votes...the dimpled chad equivalent.

I suspect a quick google would turn up more than you care to read...

--MarkusQ

[skids]

7. There were reports of several problems in NYC.

Several of the machines malfunctioned and could only vote Republican straight party tickets, reducing the number of voting machines available to those who wanted to vote Democrat or split ticket.

And there were a few instaces mentioned where the machine was broken and you could only vote for Kerry on the Democratic line (other parties in NY are allowed to sponsor a major party's candidate, thus having votes for the major party candidate count towards keeping the party on the ballot. Which is why NY has so many "3rd" parties.)

And then I had seen a news article about the seals having been broken on the backs of some of the machines. The other stuff you can get just by going to the EIRS database at voteprotect.org, sorry but I don't have a link to the newspaper article.

[Habibi]

8. I hadn't heard that about exit polls in NY

Do you have a source for that you could point me to?

[ClintCooper2003]

10. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

This link shows all the exit polls from election night, by state. Keep scrolling down for them. They show in NY, Kerry 63, Bush 37. That is way off. The tallied results were Kerry 58, Bush 40. That represents an 8% shift from exit poll to tallied result.

[ClintCooper2003]

11. For the actual tallies, visit uselectionatlas.org

[Democrat Dragon]

12. These machienes got to go!

[Bill Bored]

13. I was actually one of the first to mention this, I think.

It flies in the face of the e-voting/exit poll suspicions.

But unlike software, if you're going to do this to hardware on a large scale, you have to do it to a LOT of machines one at a time, the old fashioned way, with screwdrivers and pliers. Look at the population of NYC and NYS and see how many complaints there were compared to the rest of the country. Not many.

Also, as others have shown, these problems are easier to detect than black box problems, before, during and after the election. I'm not saying lever machines are perfect, but I'd take them over the touch screens any day.

[ClintCooper2003]

14. But it all depends on how they count the votes in New York...

They might use software supplied by ESS for example.

[Bill Bored]

16. Not that I am aware of.

There is no need for anything other than a calculator or spreadsheet really, but I can't say for sure what they use. The totals from the machines are hand copied by at least 2 canvassers who must agree, etc. and all this is then double checked later. The most frequent errors are supposed to be numbers transposed due to human error, which is eventually caught. And the mechanical counters can get stuck at 99 or 999 sometimes, but I don't think this would necessarily favor any particular candidate.

This may all change though. We have 2 bills requiring the VVPBs and audits, I hope random ones. People have suggested OpScans rather than DREs, but I don't think it's been decided yet.

If you see us going red in the next couple of years, you'll know why, but I hope we won't get duped into anything that can't be verified. I've already written to the relevant officials and people have testified before the legislature.

I hate to say it but the GOP convention, their exploitation of 9/11, Kerry's failure to hold Bush accountable for that and Guiliani may have gotten Shrub some votes in NY that he shouldn't have, not to mention the rest of the country.

[ClintCooper2003]

17. Yes but it still doesn't explain the huge discrepancy between exit polls

and results in the Empire State.

[pauldp]

15. Yeah what about the central tabulators? n/t