The adjacent photo, from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish at The Atlantic, gives a pretty good idea of who’s going to win the election – barring any last minute upsets. It has to be said that if even a small portion of “the rednecks” are for Obama, then it’s game, set and match.

However there are a number of paranoid, or as they will claim “justifiably paranoid”, Obama supporters who believe there will be an all-out attempt to steal the election by the Republicans, by means of fixed electronic voting machines.

A Collapse of Confidence

Irrespective of the truth (and who knows what that is?), confidence in electronic voting machines has collapsed. The states of Maryland and Virginia both intend to scrap their electronic voting systems after the November 4th election in favor of paper. I have little doubt that other states will follow suit.

Aside from the unreliability of the machines, there’s the awkward problem that electronic voting machines naturally create a bottleneck. If you only have 10 machines and voters take an average of 3 minutes to vote, you can only process 200 votes per hour. With paper voting you aren’t limited to just 10 people voting at the same time. The very nature of electronic voting can have the effect of disenfranchising some voters simply because voting machines break down or too few were installed in the first place.

Incidentally, Maryland paid $65 million for its electronic voting system which it will inevitably have to write off. It all looks bizarre to me – especially those videos of voting machines actually “flipping votes”. There have been reports of this from Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia and elsewhere, and in every case I’ve read about, the voting machines flip votes to the Republicans.

Nobody seems to ask the obvious question: Why is a machine vote-flipping at all?

Vote Flipping Is Truly Abnormal

Think of all the computer systems you’ve ever used, including those that didn’t work properly at times, and ask yourself when did you ever see software take a specific value and put it in the wrong place or flip data from one value to another value. I mean when you ask for $200 at the ATM, how often does it give you a different amount of money. It doesn’t happen, right?

Well actually it does, under one specific circumstance, which is with touch screen machines. The area you touch has to be calibrated to match the screen display exactly so that when you touch the screen it records the value under it as your selection. How hard is it to get that right? Well if you have owned a Palm Pilot or any other touch screen device up to and including the ubiquitous iPhone, you may have noticed that manufacturers have no problem getting this mapping right – except of course with voting machines.

Just search the web with the search terms “vote flipping” and page through the 41,200 web pages that the search brings up, to get a sense of the frequency of this phenomenon. And then try to find one example where the vote flipped from Republican to Democrat. I may have missed it, but I can’t find one.

Now let’s contemplate the fact that some of the manufacturers of voting machines are manufacturers of ATMs and we have another strange phenomenon. ATMs, you may have noticed, are extremely resistant to every kind of hacking strategy. So search the web with the term “hacking” and “voting machines” (241,000 hits) and peruse the remarkable number of reports of the hacking or hackability of voting machines. So how is it that companies that pride themselves on building secure ATMs suddenly lose all their design skills when it comes to voting machines?

I believe I have some very good questions, but unfortunately I don’t have any answers to them.