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There's a viral video going around of a voting machine in Pennsylvania that seems like its rigged—it switches votes from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney. It's just one machine, but it's also perfectly encapsulates people's Election Day fears. Here's the video:
And from the description on Youtube:
From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said "It's nothing to worry about, everything will be OK." and went back to what she was doing.
Wait what? "Everything will be ok?" That's a line fit for that really mean lady in Misery and the passage has all the elements needed for a voting machine horror story—a perennial fear for Democrats since 2004 when Diebold became a familiar name on political blogs. And it's already set Reddit on fire with some 37,000+ upvotes (the way Redditors tell people they like something).
Because the Internet works this way, the video is now setting Twitter on fire, with users calling for voter fraud (those Yahoo links are to a report of the video):
And that's sort of expected. You see, it seems that this year (like every other presidential election year) we're being bombarded with stories of voter fraud and voter suppression. This whole year we've been inundated with stories of tying Republicans, like one Republican leader in Pennsylvania who said in June that voter ID rules would help Mitt Romney win the vote, and voter suppression together. And this glitchy machine hits on those same nerves that news stories do when they release reports on the terrible voting bungle that Florida is experiencing.