Already there have been more than enough reports from more than enough places to raise serious suspicions about electronic voting machines. Machines switching people’s votes to Republican candidates have been reported so far in Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri, Broward and Miami Counties in Florida, and in three places in Texas including San Antonio and Dallas.

Obviously, vote-hopping is not happening on every touch-screen voting machine, and it’s not happening to every voter on machines that are affected. So, what is happening?

Jamie Holly on Crooks and Liars gives a clue when reporting on her own voting experience. On her county’s ballot, there is a referendum (“State Issue 1”) that was disqualified but was too late to remove from the ballot. However, an odd thing happened:

I just got back from voting and we suffered from a “glitch”. As I was voting, my ballot started off with governor and then worked down through the list. After voting for all the politicians, up next were the issues. My first issue was State issue 1, an issue dealing with Ohio’s Worker Compensation. I was expecting to see this, but knew my vote didn’t count on it…

So after my voting experience went smoothly, the person I went down with had her turn to cast her ballot. She had the same ballot, the same ballot (iso) card, and the same machine, but her ballot did not appear the same. Instead her ballot started out with a blank blue screen and then went onto the candidates and the state issues, but issue 1 was not on her ballot. She called the poll worker over who said that “this has been happening on some machines”. Well our polling place only has three machines and she was on the same machine as I just got done voting on, and this problem did not happen for me. …

The most interesting thing I kept thinking of was Ken Blackwell on CNN this past weekend saying the machines do not have any problems, it was the poll workers. Well this poll worker did everything the same as she did with me (programmed the card for ballot 84), yet our ballots appeared differently. This machine was a Diebold touch screen machine, and as a programmer I can tell you that it is a definite software glitch. The poll worker did the exact same thing she did for me and all the end user variables were the same.

If the same machine, programmed in the same way, using identical ballots, one right after the other, acts in two different ways, that’s an indication that someone has been dicking around with the programming.

One machine acting the same way with all voters will get shut down or fixed. But have the machines switch things around at random, and it can be explained away as a transient glitch. If it is reported more than once, poll workers are trained to identify it as some mere mechanical problem and follow a handbook set of instructions to “repair” the machine.

The reported vote-hopping incidents may indeed be a glitch, but not because of the vote-hopping. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t believe that the confirmation screens always show what is really being recorded on the machine–a machine which leaves no paper trail. Maybe when the vote-hopping is shown on the confirmation screen, the glitch is that the vote hopping should have been recorded and not shown to the voter for confirmation.

There is no hard evidence for this. Nothing except massive irregularities. Poll workers taking home voting machines. Voting machines being consistently proven to be wide open to hacking. Nationwide instances of voting machines acting in ways they have no business acting. The voting machines made by a company run by politically involved Republicans dedicated to delivering votes to the Republican Party–a company that fights tooth and nail to keep their machines from issuing a paper trail which can be compared to the electronic vote count. And a political party which has demonstrated an open contempt for election laws: sabotaging Democratic phone banks, illegal fake robocalls that masquerade as Democratic politicians but harass voters, illegally telling Democratic voters they will be arrested/deported if they vote, handing out bogus instructions to lead Democratic voters to the wrong polling place and on wrong dates, illegally impersonating election officials and calling Democratic voters to tell them they are not registered, “mistakenly” striking legitimate Democratic voters from voter rolls by claiming they are “felons,” the list goes on and on and on.

Yep. No hard evidence, none at all. Call me wacko paranoid conspiracy theorist. I got nothin’.