By Brad Friedman on 10/4/2012, 1:46pm PT  







First, Democrats will be troubled to see that most of the states listed above are believed to be strongly Republican states, but keep in mind that Congressional and local races, even in such states, are often very competitive. The same is true for those few states mentioned above which are believed to be Democratic-leaning. So Republicans should be equally troubled by this news.

There will now be no simple way to check for red flags of fraud or simple mistabulation on Election Night without the media consortium's Exit Poll data. (Though it should also be noted that the consortium has long refused to release raw data from their Exit Polls to the public, ever since raw data for Exit Polls in 2004 showed John Kerry winning handily in the bulk of the contested swing states, only to have computer reported election results purportedly show George W. Bush was the winner in those states.)

For example, to focus on just one of the states where Exit Polling is being scrapped, in South Carolina they use 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems across the entire state. There will be no data at all for use in finding red flags to compare to whatever the computers report the election results to be. And that's very troubling.

But it's not only states which use 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems which should be a concern to voters.

In Palm Beach County, FL last March, for example, it was only a post-election hand examination of a portion of paper ballots that revealed the computers had gotten the results of three elections wrong, naming two losing candidates to be the "winners" in two of those contests. The correct results were only determined after a court-approved hand-count of all of the paper ballots in the race, during which the company who manufactures and programs the computer tabulators, Dominion/Sequoia, admitted that all versions of their electronic voting systems have a bug that can result in the same inaccurate election results.

Those same systems used in Palm Beach County are still used in dozens of states across the country. In that case, unlike South Carolina, there were paper ballots to examine after the election, though most states do no hand examination of paper ballots at all either on Election Night or afterward. They rely instead only on the computer reported results which are either correct --- or not. Who knows?

Exit Polling data might have helped to identify problem races in such states, but no longer in some 19 of them across the country.

It was Exit Polling during the Wisconsin Recall Elections in June which predicted a 50/50 tie in the Gubernatorial recall between Scott Walker and Tom Barrett. Yet, 30 minutes or so later, after all of the news nets had reported the incredibly close Exit Polling results gathered throughout the day, the computer results told us the winner was Walker by huge numbers.

Those questionable and completely unverified results (WI does no post-election spot-checks of any of the paper ballots cast in their state elections, and only a minimal check of Presidential races months after certification) led to a bi-partisan group attempted to hand-count paper ballots across the entire state. The group is still trying to count those ballots in many counties, even though where election officials are refusing to give them access to the ballots.

The Fix goes on to note...



That is not good, and only makes the privatization of our formerly public election system even more opaque and difficult, if not impossible, for the citizenry to oversee. For those who might wish to manipulate the election system, it's now a 30-second no-brainer and just a few keystrokes away for any election insider to flip results on computer systems with almost no possibility of detection, or even indication that results may be the very opposite of the voters' intent.

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