The Machine that Alters Votes (2012 USA Election)

So there's this video of a voting machine that selects Romney when you try to click on Obama.

To someone who has had some experience with touch screen technology, it looks like the touch system is just out of sync with the UI, which could be fixed by re-calibrating the system. According to the uploader, it is not a calibration issue, because they tried tapping other names and they all worked fine. You can find the uploader's comments in the description of the video. I have no reason to doubt the uploader's sincerity, since according to Mother Jones the machine was actually taken out of service and "recalibrated." So the video is (probably) not fake.

A lot of people are now assuming this was done intentionally to steal votes from Obama in favor of Romney. The mainstream media is picking up on the story as well. The problem with this belief is that if someone did intentionally make the voting machine behave this way, they could have done something far worse. They could have made the system swap the votes invisibly, behind-the-scenes, so that nobody ever notices.

If it was done intentionally, and whoever did it could have made the machine swap votes invisibly, then you have to ask the question: Why did they make it visible? Certainly if a lot of these machines started doing what is seen in the video, a lot of people would notice, and it would be clear that there was some kind of fraud was going on. The election results would clearly be invalid. A lot of vote-altering machines would invalidate the election, but just one is enough to make everyone panic and to get the story covered by the popular news media, giving Romney some potentially bad publicity. So a possibly better explanation, if it was intentional, is that it was done by a supporter of one of the other candidates.

Or, it could just be a bug. I think it is.

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