If there is election fraud via black box, who is controlling it?

[trumad]

Is there some sort of black ops behind a curtain that controls the levers/software?

Is it Rove? Who's the matermind?

[Warren Stupidity]

1. The companies that make the boxes.

And/or people working on the design and implementation of direct recording electronic devices. Of the three companies making most of the equipment (Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S) two of them are headed by the same family (O'Dell,) and that family is heavily connected to the Republican Party.

[JackRiddler]

2. Interesting but ultimately irrelevant question...

The fundamental point must be that black box voting makes perfect election fraud possible - i.e., fraud with almost no chance of being caught. If there is no paper trail or any means of confirming a count, and if the software itself is proprietary and secret even from the purchasing client (i.e., the government), then that is necessarily unreliable because there is a gateway for fraud.

One might prove statistically that fraud must have been committed (for example by finding incredible discrepancies between districts with and without particular machines, as was the case in 2004), but establishing the who and how (of many possible pathways to a hack) might be impossible.

Based on the 2004 evidence, whoever did it preferred Bush. This can be effected by the company owners, moles within the company, or (less likely) highly sophisticated outside hackers.

But it's irrelevant - the machines should be done away with altogether because they allow for an unprecedented quality of fraud.

[BeFree]

3. Rove is

Being that nearly every vote goes through a computer system, nearly every vote is subject to change. On election night 2004, Rove is pictured at a bank of computers at a time when the NSA was tapping any telephone line they wanted. Change a few numbers here, a few hundred there as the numbers cross modems, and viola! pretty soon it adds up to some big numbers.

At your voting precinct, the black box is controlled not by elected or appointed government officials. It is controlled by the programmmers who work for private companies. That means the very core of our democracy is run not by government but by corporations. Corporations that are not under oath to protect the constitution.

The gist of your OP is correct: behind a curtain. We need to look behind that curtain, eh?

[Generic Other]

4. If it's like a virus someone programs into the machine

every person who puts a new card in the machine or downloads the company's software inadvertantly starts the funny counts in motion. Doesn't the company use cards that allow the machines to set up for new elections. They always have to be changed in some fashion for every election, so the fraud is nearly impossible to detect. You might not even know you did it.

And didn't that GOP guy named Feeney in Florida ask Clint (forgetting his last name) for some kind of backdoor way to hack the machines? That suggests Repubs and company are in on it. Don't forget CEO O'Dell vowing to deliver the vote for Bush. They seem to have the unscrupulous deals going on all over.