Marion County Ohio lies about 50 miles north of Columbus, the state capital. The county was named after General Francis Marion of the Revolutionary War. Marion is more often remembered by his nickname Swamp Fox, because of his guerrilla style warfare against the British in the swamps of South Carolina.
There are about 66,000 residents in this quiet little county in central Ohio, and like the rest of the state, a number of those residents have been trying to vote early in the presidential election. But when Marion County resident Joan Stevens tried to vote on Monday she ran into a problem that caused her some alarm.
When she touched the screen to vote for Mitt Romney, the machine lit up the name of Barack Obama.
Joan tried a second time and again the machine lit up Barack Obama when she selected Mitt Romney. Knowing she did not want to cast her vote for Obama, she tried a third time and finally, the name Mitt Romney lit up.
After leaving the voting machine, Joan reported the malfunction to board of elections personnel; she was told that the voting machine had been acting up all day. Not satisfied with the response she received, Joan took her complaint to Sophia Rogers, the top county election official. Rogers claims that they had the voting machine checked out and found nothing wrong but had it re calibrated anyway.
Rogers suggested that perhaps Joan was not hitting the touch screen properly or with not enough force. Joan responded by saying that she knows how to vote.
Then Rogers said that if anyone is still skeptical about the accuracy of the electronic voting machines that they can still opt to use a paper ballot instead and mail it in.
I can’t help but wonder how many others before and after Joan cast their vote for Romney and didn’t realize that the machine gave it to Obama instead. Voting machines only do what they are programmed to do, and you cannot convince me that this was a one-time glitch in the system. It also makes me wonder how many other voting machines in Ohio and other key swing states have been programmed to give Obama the votes that were supposed to go to Romney.
So far this year, Democrats have been caught trying to vote more than once, vote for dead people and non-U.S. citizens, so would it be out of the question to suggest that they intentionally programmed some voting machines to cast a percentage of Romney votes to Obama? And if people use paper ballots, can we trust those who count them to report the results accurately? I’ve even heard rumors of busloads of Somali nationals arriving at early voting places in Ohio and being told to vote for Obama, when they aren’t even legally allowed to vote.
The Democrats are so afraid of losing the Senate and White House, that they may stoop to almost anything they can, legal and illegal, to prevent it from happening. The thing is, how do we prove it when it does happen? U.N. people are going to be monitoring the elections to make sure people vote for Obama, so is there any chance of Romney really winning?
