The "Voting Machine Switched My Ballot" Stage of the Election is Here

The age of electronic voting machines has inaugurated the age of the 11th-hour panic about technology stealing votes. Every cycle, when voting begins, some citizens using the machines produced by Diebold and its competitors call news desks, insisting that their ballots were rigged, in the darkness of the polling booth.

In 2008, Tennessee voters reported that their ES&S machines were turning McCain votes into support for Barack Obama. In November 2010, the victims were people who wanted to vote against Harry Reid, but were repeatedly denied, before a clerk sorted things out. November 2012, it was Republicans in Ohio who told Fox News that their Romney votes were transmogrified into Obama votes. ("My personal opinion is that she hit it too hard," insisted an election clerk.)