IF the counts were changed at the central

[shraby]

tabulation on the Gems would that change the counts on each individual touch screen machine, or only the grand tallies?

If not, then a recount on each individual machine would be as it originally was. Am I right in thinking this?

[dave502d]

1. I belive they take the vote card to the tabulation .

[napi21]

2. I'm not sure either, but I heard that the individual precinct info is

transmitted to the central collection point. That question came up when the BBV first was being discussed, and they said there was no connection to the internet by the voting machines themselves, and the transmission was done via secure data line.

I've always thought that central was the place any hanky panky would take place if it did, and the way to find the flaw would be to manually compare the info from the precincts to the combined total at the central point. That doesn't seem to be the problem though. It seems the problems all happened at the precincts.

[Carl Brennan]

4. How do you think Rove's "bat cave" is linked. He was apparently making

alot of calls on election night. A court needs to supoena those records first.

[Mister K]

3. No.

The GEMS system loads the data in from the voting machines. It will not rewrite the individual cards.

[Boredtodeath]

5. That's the logical fallacy - evidence left behind

Changing totals on the GEMS servers leaves the evidence on the PCMCIA cards.

That's why this theory is so full of holes.

Anyone smart enough to manipulate an election is smart enough to do it at the place where all evidence of the manipulation is removed.

[napi21]

6. So where is that? At the precinct or the Central collection point.

I'm only semi computer literate, but you lost me with this one.

[Boredtodeath]

8. On each Touchscreen

Most likely in the program itself.

An example would be 2003 in Virginia. After impounding the voting machines, they discovered that every 100th vote went to the other candidate, regardless of voter intent.

[electropop]

7. Why bother hacking the machines?

When you can simply order them pre-configured to "deliver Ohio" or any other state? Every major manufacturer is owned by well-known right wing loyalists. The simplest thing is to have every machine built at the factory with a bias for Bush. The source code is secret (for the individual machines), so it's nearly impossible to identify the bias, and in fact the code could with trivial ease, be set up to overwrite itself with unbiased code after the election, erasing the evidence. In other words, all the losing of votes, adding phantom votes, voter intimidation, etc perpetrated by clumsy local partisans is merely icing on the cake. The local Republic (or even Democratic) election officials would be blissfully unaware that the machines they are operating, are actually stealing the election as they watch.

The fact that the machines are easily hackable is probably not part of Rove's plan; it's merely the shoddy state of the art in American commercial software. In fact, the hackability is probably the only hope we have of ever winning another election. Assuming the Republics haven't gone to Linux by 2006, they may regret using Windoze-based cheating machines, when the thousands of angry young hackers get to work. Only after that will they consider making elections auditable and maybe even fair.