Guess who bought Ohio voting machines

So the debates are behind us, thank God.  We now humbly approach our collective opportunity to fulfill again the painstakingly forged democratic vision of the framers of the Constitution.  We know that we hold in a dynamic balance, as the framers did, the tension between pragmatism and utopianism.  This sacred quadrennial ritual is known to the great majority of us, the fortunate inheritors of American citizenship, as the Presidential election.  

Alternatively, this revered ritual is known to a small subset of us as prime time to steal the so-called election, to snatch away the choice to fill highest seat of power from the hands of the people, and to make the world safe once and for all for bottomless-pit plutocrats.  

What makes me inject such a cynical nasty note into the conversation the day after the people got to tune into Round Three of democracy in action?  It is an article summarizing investigative reports on just such activities published on the All Voices website; it has an eye-catching title: "Romney family buys voting machines through Bain Capital investment".

Holy Hannah, you say!  I know I do.  This is not a joke.  It is not from The Onion, and the article references other quite credible sources also reporting details of this incredibly disturbing, unfathomably contemptuous and far-over-the-line behavior. 

Here is a sampling of the report:

Tagg Romney, the son of Republican presidential candidate Mitt RomneyMitt Romney, has purchased electronic voting machines that will be used in the 2012 elections in Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Washington and Colorado.

"Late last month, Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis at FreePress.org broke the story of the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital investment team involved in H.I.G. Capital which, in July of 2011, completed a "strategic investment" to take over a fair share of the Austin-based e-voting machine company Hart Intercivic," according to independent journalist Brad Friedman.
. . .

Truth out reports:
"Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who "owns" the White House."

Both The Nation and New York Times confirm the connection between the Romney family, Solamere and the Bain Capital investment in the voting machine company, Hart Intercivic, whose board of directors serve H.I.G. Capital.
. . .

What it all says is that Mitt Romney, with the help of his family and Bain Capital connections, is more than willing to try to take the White House through illegitimate and highly unethical, if not specifically illegal means.
. . .

The nagging question is why, if Mr. Romney truly has the qualities that American voters want in their president, does he have to go to such great and questionable lengths to try to win the election.

That "nagging question" is a rhetorical one, of course.  It is a truism among those of us who do not live in the RNC/Fox News alternative universe that the GOP, its ship having been pirated by the Tea Party, Grover Norquist, theocrats, evangelicals, and other extreme-right elements, must, in order to attract votes, obfuscate their intention to steer the country over the edge of the flat earth they inhabit.  If they tell the truth, they expect to lose.  

Nevertheless, that might not be enough.  With so much at stake and -- fortunately for them -- so little concern for the petty rules that lesser men fret about, they must make sure the election isn't left in the hands of the little people.  The voters may see through Romney's late-in-the-game renunciations of hard-right policies concerning women's rights, and taxes, and safety net programs, and defense spending, ...   

So, we'll bar the voters and/or deter them from voting with ID laws and billboards and truth squads and purges. 

And if some get through anyway, baboom, we'll just buy the voting machines -- they can be so unreliable -- and "count the votes" creatively!

It's scary that I have seen not a whiff of this in print or on TV.  That had better change, and I'm hoping it will, at least on MSNBC, tonight -- assuming the story is true, of course.  While it is not out of "character", it still seems incredibly impolitic for them to have done this.  So I would not rule out the possibility that the report isn't completely true or that our inferences may be different from their intentions...

If it is true, though, and if it does come out in the media places where America's reality TV watchers fear not to go, it could turn off some of the still undecided voters that the exalted imperial Romneys would think it's okay to violate the law, to buy an illegal and unethical edge, and to thwart the will of the voters.

The far and away most important question this raises for me is whether there is a way of detecting any manipulation of the way the machines register and/or count up votes, should there be a federal investigation before, during or after the vote.

As a former poll official for four years, I have participated in the close-of-day printing out of results from our machines (electronic machines, votes cast by pressing the buttons next to the names, with detachable data cassettes) and the hand recording of results from the printouts on duplicate forms. One copy is posted at the polling place and the other is delivered by the judge of elections with the data cartridges to the designated collection point for the township.

Not all machines in different states work this same way in terms of how votes are input and how the results are taken out of the machine. Some still use optical scanning to input, I believe.  Some are all-electronic and communicate by a direct electronic link to central computers. I do not know whether each precinct also records and posts results when they use that type of equipment. It ought to be and probably is standard practice in all precincts across the country that the tallies in each precinct are made public at the precinct level.

So, if all that is accurate, a recount or investigation could revert back to the precinct level count, so any hanky-panky that would have a chance of flying under the radar of a careful recount would have to take place before the point in the process of aggregating precinct tallies.

All of which suggests that something would have to be programmed into the machine software that registered votes differently from the way they were cast by the voters and/or totalled them internally differently from the actual totals.  But it would have to be done sparingly, selectively so as not to be so out of whack with the precinct's registration numbers that it looked prima facie questionable. In my precinct, for example, the high ratio of Democrats to Repubicans means that a tally of less than 55-60% for Obama would look fishy.  On the other hand, one could in theory be more "liberal" with Romney-padding in strongly Repubican precincts.

Then the question would be, could this be done in such a way that a technically sophisticated investigator could look into the machine's code and not be able to find the smoking gun?

THAT -- not the slings and arrows, the being and the not being -- IS THE QUESTION!