Maryland Trump Supporter: They Switched My Vote to Hillary - https://t.co/FkNiEUOZHH pic.twitter.com/dalY9KBWtj
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) October 28, 2016
(Oct. 28, 2016)—A woman in Hollywood is the latest in a number of early voters to claim that her ballot was switched to Hillary Clinton after she had tried to vote for Donald Trump today.
Noting that she had seen reports on the news of votes being flipped, the woman said, "I went in and voted a straight Republican ticket and thank God I went back and checked and they had switched my vote from Trump to (Hillary)."
She said that she had to get the vote changed back by alerting election officials, who simply told her to vote for a second time.
"I went back the second time and made sure they didn't change it," she concluded.
As we reported earlier this week, voters in numerous areas of Texas have made a series of complaints that votes are being switched from Trump to Clinton.
One election official responded by claiming the problems were caused by voters not understanding how to use the machines properly.
"Typically, we've found it's voter error with the equipment," Frank Phillips, Tarrant County's election administrator, told WFAA. "Sometimes they vote straight party and then click on other candidates … or do something with the wheel … There is not an issue with the equipment."
However, Trump supporters continue to point to the reports as evidence that vote fraud may be taking place.
In Maryland, it is impossible to legally document voting irregularities experienced by the respective citizen; the Maryland State Board of Elections has issued an administrative regulation prohibiting use of cameras, cell phones, and "computer equipment" in the polling place.
The voting machines being used for the general election were just rolled out this year and were first used in the primary this spring. The machines are manufactured by Election Systems and Software and are proprietary; the system software is not open to public inspection. This has been a cause of concern for years by many advocates of a fully open and transparent election process.
Maryland just switched to the new system after concerns about the previous electronic voting system leaving no paper trail that would facilitate an audit. The new system is still electronic, however it generates a paper ballot, based on the voter's input to a computer terminal (voting machine), which is then scanned by an optical character reader.
Ironically, the voter receives no paper receipt of how he voted, making voting in Maryland probably the only important transaction in the nation where the customer does not receive a receipt. ATM's, gasoline pumps, automated parking attendants, and self-checkout machines all provide paper receipts; voting machines do not.
In the primary election, "machine malfunctions caused an hour delay in opening polls at the Beth Am Synagogue in Baltimore," according to a Washington Post report on April 27, 2016. That same report notes that Governor Hogan "raised concerns about election officials' rushing the new machines into service."
Coincidentally, southern Maryland's elected public servant in the House of Representatives, Democrat Steny Hoyer just penned an op-ed that ran in The Hill titled, "Trump 'Rigged' Election Claims: Further Proof He is Unfit to be President." In the hit piece, Hoyer attacks Trump's concern about a rigged election—a concern Democrats had no problem expressing in the not-too-distant Bush v. Gore election.
Hoyer opened his op-ed with this:
Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress have made some dubious claims this election season. But perhaps the most desperate and dangerous of all is their repeated assertion that somehow this election might be 'rigged.' They are sending a clear message to their supporters: that if Donald Trump loses in November, the result will be illegitimate. This goes beyond the dog-whistle campaigning we've seen so far and ventures into open allegations that are as ridiculous as they are perilous to our democracy, and in last night's debate Donald Trump doubled down by refusing to say that he would accept the outcome of this election.Hoyer also distributed a copy of the cleary partisan op-ed via his official government email address, Democratic.Whip.Press@mail.house.gov.
Apparently Hoyer did not expect that the very thing Donald Trump warned against would rear its head right in Hoyer's own backyward, come to the immediate attention of the alternative media and appear at the top of The Drudge Report since Friday.
For more information about how and when to vote in this general election, please refer to this page.
David Noss contributed to this report.