How are the votes counted off the NY lever machines and then

sent to county Board of Elections? I live in NY and I can't explain the surge in Bush votes from the exit poll projections. I also can't explain why apparently my brain-dead neighbors voted 55% for Bush according to the county numbers. I'd much rather find fraud than hate them all.

as they are read off the back of the machine.

you can slip out. So, you not only read the numbers off the back, but you take the counter out and return with it to the Board of Elections HQ for the county.

I notice a lot of people are acting like these NY machines are some great thing (in the same way that people thought that touch screens should replace punch cards in 2000).

These machines are NOT the solution. They're a complicated mass of gears and they're just as easy to fuck with and not all that transparent as any other paper-less voting method.

I think Venezuela used a pretty good method in the last recall election. Basically, it was a touch screen that printed a ballot that, once OK'd by the voter, slipped into a ballot box. So you had an instant count at the end of the day. There was no opportunity to figure out where you were losing and to get your people on the ground in those precincts to fuck up the count, and there was a totally auditable paper trail.

It'd be very hard to to tamper with these machines in any unobvious way.

Nobody could tell that it was messed up unless you measured every gear.

Seriously, before this week, I've NEVER heard ANYONE say that NY machines were good ways to count votes. They are the mechanical equivalent of software. It's too easy to hide the thing inside that's stealing votes, and only an expert would be able to tell from looking that votes are being skimmed.

if they can perpetrate fraud from those they can do it from anywhere.