On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Rick Hasen <rick.hasen@lls.edu> wrote:

"Watch this Voting Machine Change Votes"

Gizmodo reports.

UPDATE: Note the comments, which claim that this is deliberate manipulation
with the voter's thumb.

I only saw the video once before it was taken down (if someone has a
copy, I'd love to see it).

It was hard to tell what is going on, and certainly the user's thumb
or other part of his hand could have caused this behavior.

However, he does it twice, and the second time a slightly different
way (where he doesn't re-select the Republican congressional
candidate, but immediately goes for the Republican Governor
candidate).  The first time, he chooses the R Governor choice and an
error pops up that says this will be an over-vote, so presumably the
machine is interpreting some touch he's making as a choice in the
Congressional race, in which he had already made a choice.  When he
clicks through this warning, he then tries again to select the R
Governor, and all the subsequent Green party choices are selected, as
if he's selecting the straight-party choice for Green.

The second time around, after he deselects all the Green candidates,
there is no R Congressional choice highlighted when he selects the R
Governor choice, and the same consequence happens (all subsequent
Green party choices are selected), but this time without the warning.

This is pretty strange behavior, if it's not his hand.  There are
types of "calibration bias" where an errant thumb on one side of the
screen can shift the calibration of the screen in one direction
seemingly inconsistently (because the hand causing the bias may
shift), but the consistency with which he's able to select the R
Congressional choice seems to rule that out as a likely choice.

Anyway, maybe it's not useful to speculate about this video since it's
no longer available.  Another possibility is a ballot programming
error of some sort, and that would be easy to discern by simply
attempting to cast a similar vote like this on this machine.  (A
*wise* adversary attempting to do mischief wouldn't make the interface
behave this strangely... )

best, Joe
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