Reply #32: Tampering with lever machines ... [View All]

is possible, but it's not all that easy to do.

They have no paper trail, so in a some sense they
are akin to the DRE's.

A lot of these machines have been around since 1890,
and they are built like tanks. It's not exactly
trivial to open them up or carry them around. A
maintenace technician who knew the machines well
enough might possibly be paid beforehand to adjust
some gears or cams inside, I suppose, but I'm not
sure it would be very easy to do, without leaving
evidence.

Even if this is possible, you'ld have to access the
machine afterward, and put it back the way it was, or
it would definitely be detectable.

The other way to tamper would be for poll workers to
simply add on votes, after the polls close. This is
supposed to be prevented by putting seals on the machines
after voting ends, then counting in a central location.

The number of votes cast can be checked against the
number of signatures on the precinct records, of course,
so to make the fraud untraceable, you have to forge those
signatures too.

I don't know the history, as to whether there are
specific cases where the first type of fraud happened
in NY.

I'm going to try to do a little research on that.