A Republican candidate in Chicago, Jim Moynihan, tried to vote for himself in early elections and was surprised to find that the voting machine registered a vote for his opponent, a Democrat:

While using a touch screen voting machine in Schaumburg, Moynihan voted for several races on the ballot, only to find that whenever he voted for a Republican candidate, the machine registered the vote for a Democrat in the same race. He notified the election judge at his polling place and demonstrated that it continued to cast a vote for the opposing candidate’s party. Moynihan was eventually allowed to vote for Republican candidates, including his own race.

This is probably an isolated error, right? There’s just no way that this was an intentional rigging of the election. Right. As the midterm elections heat up, with Republicans slated to win a vast majority of seats in Congress, it seems that Democrats are doing whatever it takes to win. Honestly, this is just par for the course. Voting machine tampering has become more of an issue over the years, and there is good reason to believe voting machines aren’t accurately tallying votes.

Of course, this issue has been widely reported on when it comes to Democrat votes being switched to Republican. The documentary Hacking Democracy showed how easily Diebold voting machines could be hacked. Of course, the film-makers pointed to a vast right-wing conspiracy to change votes and steal elections. But it has been less widely publicized when a voting machine turns left. When a voting machine votes Democrat, it’s a computer glitch or a hardware error. If it turns Republican, it’s the center of some Republican conspiracy.

How about this, though? It’s likely that machines go both ways. It’s very likely that both parties has people within them that are willing to do whatever it takes, even cheating the system, to get their own people elected. And if it is the case that a voting machine could easily be tampered with, perhaps we should just return to paper ballots and a bipartisan counting committee which has to agree on numbers before they are released. Otherwise, we’ll never really know.

An important quote, often attributed to Joseph Stalin, applies here, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.” Indeed.