They're Going to Steal It Again Watch, Sunday Edition

It's clear this is going to have to become a series. It's also clear that I'm going to be linking to Bradblog a lot over the next two weeks.

Today's Republican Electoral Shenanigans: Votes are being switched from Democratic to Republican on touch screens in West Virginia.

From the linked article at the Gazette Mail:

At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.

Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.

When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."

Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.

On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.

Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.

"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.

"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican," Thomas said.

"When I hollered about that, the girl who worked there said, 'Push it again.' I pushed Obama again and it stayed there. Then, the machine did the same thing for other candidates.

There is absolutely no way in hell this is accidental.

It is important for all of us to understand the machines on which we vote. Here in my neck of the woods, we vote on the Sequoia Advantage machines that have been shown to be vulnerable to hacking. The only thing we can do, since we have no paper trail, is to look at the LCD window that's next to the vote casting button and see if it matches what we pressed on the keypad. But the bottom line is that no matter where you vote, your vote is vulnerable to tampering. And while John McCain and Sarah Palin are whipping their frothing minions into a hate-filled frenzy about "voter fraud" because people being paid a few bucks by ACORN are slackers, there is active vote-switching, almost all of it from Democratic to Republican, going on in early voting.