Video: Stemmachine verandert stem op Obama naar Romney

Terwijl de Amerikaanse presidentsverkiezingen in volle gang zijn, weigert een stemmachine in de Amerikaanse staat Pennsylvania een stem op Obama te verwerken. In plaats daarvan selecteert de machine automatisch een stem op Romney, dat meldt NBC. De kiezer maakte hier een filmpje van en zette deze vervolgens op YouTube.

Onder de video heeft de kiezer – onder de naam centralpavote – beschreven wat er precies gebeurde:

My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.

There is a lot of speculation that the footage is edited. I’m not a video guy, but if it’s possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so. The jumping frames are a result of the shitty camera app on my Android phone, nothing more.

In de VS is er al een tijd een discussie gaande over de betrouwbaarheid van de stemmachines. Eerder werd bekend dat Romney via investeringsmaatschappijen aandeelhouder is in het bedrijf dat stemcomputers bouwt voor de huidige verkiezingen. Het is onduidelijk op welke schaal de machines defecten vertonen.

Lees ook: Familie Romney koopt stemmachines op MSNBC: Machine turns vote for Obama into one for Romney