Voting Machine Changing Barack Obama votes to Mitt Romney's

[poop_of_death]

A Pennsylvania voting machine has been removed after it was found turning votes for President Obama into a vote for Romney. Internet user, centralpavote, recorded the malfunction on his smartphone and uploaded the video to popular content aggregator, Reddit.com. The posting shot to instant fame (with 4800 ‘up votes’ on Reddit as of the time of

Comments

[ohmiya_sg]

Touch machines (any kind of machine, not just voting) often do this. I've had a lot of trouble with the self-checkout machines at the grocery store because of this. It's not like they change it after you submit your vote, so as long as you look at what's been checked, you can tell an official it's not working correctly or press lower to get your vote in.

[myrrhmade]

This scares the purple fuck out of me.

[ebay313]

From what I read earlier the person tried touching in various places without luck. Clicking Romney selected Romney, clicking right on Obama selected Romney, clicking near the bottom of Obama selected Romney, and clicking Jill Stein (one candidate below Obama) selected Jill Stein. I've used touchscreens before that were off and you basically had to click below what you wanted to get it to register, but if that was the case here, clicking where Jill Stein was should have selected Obama, not Jill Stein.

And I'm sure there are plenty of people who would not notice that the wrong box was highlighted.

[corinn]

The YouTube description of the vid said:

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

[moonbladem]

Definitely suspicious. I think some of the machines were tampered with. I hope people are alert enough to notice that when they select Obama, Romney is actually highlighted.