Votes for Obama Switching to McCain in Early Voting in Jackson County
UPDATE: Now Putnam County, WV Reports Votes Flipping D to R as Well...
By Brad Friedman on 10/18/2008, 12:46pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Here we go again. Completely unverifiable touch-screen voting machines, in this case, made by ES&S, flipping votes from one candidate to another. Yet again. From the Saturday Gazette-Mail...

Some early W.Va. voters angry over switched votes
Jackson County touch-screens switched votes, 3 residents say

At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.

Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.
...
Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.

"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.

"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican," Thomas said.
...
"Jackson County is a Republican county. I am a registered Republican, but I have been voting Democrat since the 1990s."

Thomas, who brought his daughter with him to the polls, said she had the same problem.

More at the original story. See HDNet's stunning, and almost completely ignored, 2007 exposé "The Trouble With Touchscreens" (includes video) for more details on the failed quality control and verified reports of vote-flipping on touch-screen machines made by ES&S, the world's largest supplier of voting systems.

LATE UPDATE: And now Putnam County, WV voters are also reporting votes flipping from Democratic to Republican on ES&S touch-screens as well. Details here...

UPDATE 10/21/08, 10:56am: More Putnam voters report the same problems on the ES&S touch-screens used across the entire state (and responsible for losing 18,000 votes in a Democratic district, in a very close FL '06 Congressional race in Sarasota which ended up going to the Republican by just 369 votes). The latest from Putnam:

[Martha Louise] Harrington, a retired home health worker who lives in Hurricane, said, "I was very cautious to put my fingernail in the middle of the square. I hit it in the square to vote for Obama. Immediately, it went to McCain.
...
Koon said he had no problem casting an early vote for president.

"However, when I chose Jay Rockefeller - and there is at least a finger's distance between the two choices - it selected Jay Wolfe and printed his name on the receipt.

"I pushed Jay Rockefeller again a few times and it canceled Jay Wolfe. Then I chose Jay Rockefeller again and it verified it."

UPDATE 10/21/08, 12:05pm: Votes now also flipping on ES&S iVotronic machines in Davidson County (Nashville), Tennessee. Details here...

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