Update [2008-11-4 13:48:27 by Steven D]: Philadelphia voters (and maybe Pennsylvania voters, in general) please read this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer before you vote. It seems the voting machines may cancel out votes for Obama if you don’t do things the right way.

Repeated information from my earlier post this morning: if you have any problems at your polling place call Election Protection at this number:

1-866-OUR-VOTE

otherwise known as:

1-866-687-8683

Or go to this link and file a report.

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Who could have predicted that our high tech electronic voting machines would fail in “massive numbers” across Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Florida?

Well, a lot of people actually. Since many, many of these machines malfunctioned in battleground states like Ohio in 2004, election integrity advocates have been pushing for the replacement of these easily hackable, costly, slow and prone to break down machines known for flipping votes from Democrats to Republicans.

Too bad no one cared enough to do anything about it. Not the Democrats in Congress, anyway, despite the efforts of a few concerned Progressive Congressional representatives. Thus, despite all the warnings, despite all those who recognized and predicted the numerous problems that voting on these machines would create during this pivotal election in which voter turnout is unprecedented, we have the beginning of chaos on this Election Day:

An election monitoring group is asking officials in Virginia to address reports of massive voting machine failures and voters being turned away from polls, and it may go to court if no action is taken.

Election Protection, a nonprofit group aimed at cataloging and correcting problems at the polls, says it has received more than 27,000 calls from voters since 5 a.m. Tuesday. Most problems have been reported in Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey and Florida […]

“We don’t want to be chicken little here,” said Jonah Goldman, who directs the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Campaign for Fair Elections. “What we’re trying to do is report what we’re seeing out in the field. Unfortunately this is what we expected.”

During a press conference Tuesday morning, group representatives said they were asking election officials in Virginia to extend voting by two hours. The group also wants election to ensure that paper ballots are available in precincts where electronic voting machines break down.

If elections officials fail to act, the group could file a lawsuit in federal court, but it hopes to avoid that option.

Utterly predictable. Utterly ignored by the mainstream media and election officials, who were far more concerned about so called “voter fraud” by Democrats, allegations that an official of the McCain campaign has now effectively admitted were bogus from the beginning:

But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee, said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which [voter fraud resulting from false registrations submitted by organizations like ACORN] had occurred.

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse.”

We knew the machines would screw up. But no one in the mainstream media really ran with that story. Even well known members of the progressive blogosphere regularly seek to downplay this issue. Yet, in every election since at least 2002, we keep seeing the same problems with these machines rear their ugly hydra heads. At the end of the day, whether Obama wins or loses, millions of votes that could have been cast for him will be “lost” or simply not cast at all, because of the failures and flaws of these machines. And no one will know with any certainty how accurate the vote count will have been.

Watch tonight. There’s a very good chance that the last tracking polls before the election and the exit polls will be wildly off from the reported vote totals. And if that is the case, no one will mention that the reliability of these machines might be too blame. No, the exit polls themselves will be labeled “biased” and “invalid.”

And all this could have been prevented if we just used plain old fashioned paper ballots. Cheaper. Easier to use. Faster. Safer. More “little d” democratic. But this is America, and God forbid we make it easy for our citizens to vote.