So Goes Ohio…

November 5, 2012 in Montana

by lizard

Forget polls and the statistical wizardry of Nate Silver. Forget early voting, turning out the base, and the impact of super storm Sandy. Forget the fights over voter suppression and campaign spending.

Because none of it will matter if Ohio is about to get hijacked by the GOP.

Here’s how Brad Friedman’s piece begins:

Last week, Bob Fitrakis and Gerry Bello at FreePress.org reported an important story concerning what they described as “uncertified ‘experimental’ software patches” being installed at the last minute on electronic vote tabulation systems in 39 Ohio counties.

The story included a copy of the contract [PDF] between Republican Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office and ES&S, the nation’s largest e-voting system manufacturer, for a new, last-minute piece of software created to the custom specifications of the secretary of state. The contract itself describes the software as “High-level enhancements to ES&S’ election reporting software that extend beyond the current features and functionality of the software to facilitate a custom-developed State Election Results Reporting File.”

A subsequent story at the Free Press the following day included text said to be from a Nov. 1 memo sent from the Ohio secretary of state’s Election Counsel Brandi Laser Seske to a number of state election officials confirming the use of the new, uncertified software on Ohio’s tabulator systems. The memo claims that “its function is to aid in the reporting of results” by converting them “into a format that can be read by the Secretary of State’s election night reporting system.”

Um…aid? Aid who?

Hopefully the conspiracy theory smear will be enough if tomorrow Ohio breaks inexplicably for Mitt.

Regardless who carries Ohio, no organization or company should be able to make software changes right before an election. This should be taken seriously. Tomorrow’s election may hinge on compromised machines, and I’m not talking about Mitt Romney.