Some historical context for the recent incidents of voting machines in Democrat-run Illinois and Maryland switching Republican votes to Democrat.
“As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”
— William Marcy Tweed, (1823-1878). “Boss Tweed” was head of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that looted millions in graft, corruption, and open bribery from New York City in the 19th Century.
“Comrades, I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how. But what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how.”
— Josef Stalin
So far, there are no reports of “calibration errors” switching Democrat votes to Republican.
Ten-percet of the voting precincts in the City of Philadelphia reported not one single vote for Mitt Romney in the last Presidential election, and no-one barely made a peep over it. Statistically that’s impossible if the votes were fairly-counted. …Not one ??
When I lived in Philly back in the 1990s’, one Presidential Primary I went to vote and no-one at the polling station knew that you had to change the mechanical voting machine from Democrat to Republican — or how to do it. (There’s a pull-lever that the poll-worker has to pull to unlock only-one Party’s candidates at a time.) Once I showed them how it worked — we used the same machines in NJ where I grew up and we had been shown how they worked when I was in elementary school — I had to step-aside and let the next Democratic-voter use the machine so they could reset it and allow me to cast my vote.
The last NJ Primary election, I voted just before the precinct closed at 8pm. After being open for 14-hours, and I was the 16th-voter — of any party — out of over 800-registered voters in our voting-district. Sixteen voters!! And over half were the precinct-workers themselves exercising their rights-to-vote. And we have Moter-Voter and same-day registration and no ID requirements.
It’s not Voter Suppression that’s the problem; it’s voter apathy, laziness and “who counts the votes” that’s the problem.
Worse than this (I do think this stuff is a calibration issue and more a reason to use optical scan rather than electronic) is the recent Okeefe video where every democratic campaign worker encouraged a non citizen to vote.