Di Leo: Election Fraud and the Programmable Screen

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Posted on 10/30/2024 5:32:42 PM PDT by jfd1776

Many still assume that there is only one kind of vote fraud: a bunch of crooked poll workers filling out ballots in the names of dead people. While that does still happen, it’s only one out of dozens of completely different methods, all of which add up to put elections at risk from coast to coast.

Today, let’s talk about touchscreens.

As the nation has absorbed the computer age – with laptops, smartphones and tablets virtually ubiquitous – the boards of bureaucrats that run our local elections have jumped at the chance to offer touchscreens as a voting option.

Think of the benefits: You can use larger font sizes for people with bad eyesight! You can print the official campaign photo of the candidate to help remind the voter who is who! You can display just one race at a time on the screen, for people who get easily distracted or who tend to skip offices!

But there are downsides, too many to count and too easily missed.

It’s easy to make a mistake when voting with a touchscreen… and it’s even easier to ensure mistakes – by programming the cheat right into the system.

With a punch card, you have always had to double-check to be sure the chad went through. With an optical scan ballot, you have always had to be careful to ensure the oval is filled in, or the line is thick enough, or the X is clearly in the box. No matter the method, there are ways to miss.

Too many people skip this critical step of double-checking their work.

But with the touchscreen approach, there are special challenges, specific to the technology involved.

Here’s the issue: a pressure-sensitive computer touchscreen is not like a traditional ballot, where there are pre-cut holes for a chad to be pushed through, or pre-printed boxes that you fill in with a pen.

A touchscreen is actually like any television set or computer monitor: it is just one big, empty field, with millions of tiny pixels in it, each of which has to be programmed to have a task or meaning.

Think about when you’ve typed a Facebook post on your cellphone, and discovered a typo that you need to correct. You have to touch it again and again, in order to find the exact point to correct that spelling or punctuation, right?

Well, it’s the same here. A touchscreen voting machine is just as sensitive; it’s just as important to hit the precisely correct spot to register your choice.

In order to build the ballot for each individual election – in fact, for each individual precinct, since neighboring precincts will have different ballots, as different districts have different boundaries – some software programmer somewhere must draw the squares on each step of the ballot progression, and then, having drawn the squares that the voter sees, he programs the area that gets counted when touched – by designing a targeted section to send the signal to be recorded as a vote.

And guess what? That targeted touchscreen section may or may not perfectly match the square that you see before you.

Let’s think about how this could go wrong.

Perhaps, they draw a one inch square, and ensure that the entire one inch square will be recorded as a vote for the person whose name is in, or next to, that square. Any spot on the screen not inside one of the squares won’t register a vote at all. That would be nice.

But that’s not necessarily how it happens.

They could make the field that gets recorded for your candidate either smaller or larger than the one inch square that you see.

They could make it much smaller, so that if you don’t hit it in the exact dead center, it doesn’t count. Or they could make it much larger, so that even if you miss the center of the square, as long as you are within a quarter inch or so of the borders, it still counts. But what else could they do, if they want to be really sneaky?

The programmer could design one candidate’s active pressure point to be only half of his square, and design his opponent’s square so that an inch-wide field all around his square gets counted for him. Or the programmer could set it up so that outside the Republican square itself, the entire rest of the screen goes to the Democrat. No, we’re not making this up, it has happened. We just don’t know how often.

It has also been discovered in some places over the years that sometimes the programmers just flip the boxes completely, so that, for example, all Republican-intended votes go to the Democrat and all Democrat-intended votes go to the Republican. They could do this in an area where they are sure that the real majority will be for Republicans, so they can claim that it’s a simple programming error, not an intentional cheat. But if it’s not caught, that’s a majority flipped to the Democrats instead of the Republicans.

(To be fair, we should admit that it’s conceivable that it could go the other way, and the cheating could be done in the Republicans’ favor, but evidence of Republican vote fraud is so rare it’s not worth looking at, while evidence of Democrat vote fraud is overwhelming).

How often is the touchscreen manipulated this way? We don’t know. As with all vote fraud, very little is reported or prosecuted, so it’s impossible to tell for certain just how often it happens, though the evidence indicates that it is far more than anyone publicly admits.

Worse, since the mass media is on the side of the party that commits the vote fraud, news reports are almost always written to explain away such issues as accidental, or as user error or faulty machinery (see this 2016 article from NPR, for example).

It’s a little harder to explain it away when a candidate tries to vote for his own name, and watches the computer register his vote for his own opponent. Consider the particularly famous case of reverse-programming in Illinois in 2016, when state representative candidate Jim Moynihan watched his voting machine register his own vote for his opponent, Michelle Mussman, the cursor jumping to register her name before his very eyes (Mussman “won,” incidentally; no surprise there).

In fact, there are almost countless ways to cheat in elections. It is treason. It is unforgivable. But it does happen, every day, in every election, in every state.

Touchscreen error – or touchscreen rigging – is just one of many methods. But at least it’s one the voter can usually protect himself against, if he’s careful. Usually, there’s even a printed tape at the end of your touchscreen vote that you read over and take with you, for one final check; please take advantage of this too.

The larger question is how well or poorly your own state and local governments fight against this kind of corruption.

Please be careful. Check every vote; check every ballot. Don’t carelessly allow your precious ballot to be a part of the Democrats’ effort to destroy this greatest country on God’s green earth.

Copyright 2024 John F Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.

1 posted on 10/30/2024 5:32:42 PM PDT by jfd1776

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