Will Pennsylvania be this year's Florida?

It seems unlikely on the surface.  Obama is currently leading McCain 52-40 there.  Yet McCain is concentrating huge efforts in Pennsylvania, which given that he's down by 12 points in the latest polls is downright creepy -- he's officially given up on states with a greater combined electoral vote and where the race is much closer and he has a far better chance of closing the gap. Why? Unlike those states, Pennsylvania's voting machines are almost all electronic, with no paper trails, thus eminently open to hacking. If the election's going to be stolen electronically, Pennsylvania will be ground zero.

Here's some background.  Today electoral-vote.com, the best and fairest electoral-map website, carries this telling news item:

McCain Concedes Colorado, Iowa, and New Mexico
CNN is reporting that McCain is making those tough decisions that politicians love to talk about. According to CNN, McCain is abandoning Colorado (9 EVs), Iowa (7 EVs) and New Mexico (5 EVs). If Obama wins these three he gets 21 EVs. Add these to the 252 EVs Kerry won and he has 273 and becomes President. McCain's strategy at this point is to win Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, and--get this--Pennsylvania. The first six are arguably swing states, but our three-poll average puts Obama 12 points ahead in Pennsylvania. McCain is effectively betting the farm on a state which looks like an Obama landslide. It is a strange choice. Colorado looks a lot easier than Pennsylvania. James Carville once famously said that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama sandwiched in between. Maybe McCain is going to go all out to win the white working class men in the Alabama section of Pennsylvania. McCain can't possibly do it on the economy. What's left? Maybe run against the Wright/Ayers ticket? Any way you look at it, this has to be a desperation move.

As it happens, the big untold story of this election is and quite probably will continue to be the profound hackability of the electronic portion of the national vote.  Every cybersecurity expert you care to consult will confirm that the electronic voting machines in use in this election are easy to hack, and if hacked it's difficult to detect and all but impossible to trace or even confirm once it's been done.  Which is why cyber-savvy monitoring of all electronic voting machines -- including careful logging of all hard- and software maintenance and I.D.ing of all individuals with access to the machines -- and of all vote-reporting trunklines in the days leading up to the election and while voting and vote-reporting are in progress on election day is essential to there being even the slightest chance that any vote-hacking efforts will be detected, or to achieving even a bare-minimum level of confidence that the vote was not hacked.  

Is such cyber-savvy monitoring in place anywhere in this country where electronic voting machines without paper trails are being used?  I am not aware of any, anywhere.  Why is this monumental, national-security-level breach of election security not being talked about everywhere in the media?  

No, at this point there is no verifiable unfolding story of electronic hacking in progress, but there is a thoroughly verifiable story of the existence of a profound risk that such hacking can occur without detection, and as renowned cybersecurity expert Stephen Spoonamore points out in a series of interviews posted to YouTube last month, if an election of such profound consequences for our nation and for the world can be stolen that easily (for a few million bucks, says Spoonamore, and several score people, at least to pull off coordinated trunkline hacks, though insider jobs like Diebold's last-minute distribution of the "software glitch" correction patch that stole the 2002 Georgia election would be much easier), then why wouldn't any number of unscrupulous powers-that-be, including foreign governments, try to do it?  It's a no-brainer.

Another crucial source is Verified Voting's "Election Equipment 2008" page (www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier), which has election maps showing what kind of voting machines are being used where, nationwide, state by state and county by county.

As of today, according to electoral-vote.com, if you combine all states that are leaning either strongly, weakly, or barely for Obama, he has 364 electoral votes; for McCain, 171; and South Dakota's 3 are tied.  

McCain has now narrowed his campaign focus to just seven states, six of which are barely leaning towards Obama and thus are arguably still in play: Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.  The seventh, Pennsylvania, appears to be far out of play, all but locked up by Obama.  But if McCain were to pull off a miracle, or a miracle plus a theft, then those seven states' combined electoral votes, together with all the others where McCain leads, would give him 272 electoral votes and the presidency.  Yet a much more likely path to victory for McCain would be a strategy that focussed not on Pennsylvania but on Colorado, North Dakota, and Iowa (two of which McCain has abandoned) instead of Pennsylvania -- those three would put him over the top at exactly the required minimum of 270.  So again, why Pennsylvania, when these other three states are already much closer races that would be far easier for McCain to legitimately win?  It's simple:  North Dakota and Iowa exclusively use paper-based voting systems, and of those Colorado counties that use electronic voting, all but one require paper verification.  Whereas the vast majority of Pennsylvania's counties, including Pittsburgh and Philly, use electronic voting machines with no paper trail at all.  

Of the other states that are amenable to electronic hacking, all of them are either already leaning towards McCain or, if they're leaning towards Obama, they do so by huge margins and lack the kind of "secret Alabama" that James Carville claims for Pennsylvania's vast rural center, and what's more none of them match Pennsylvania's electoral clout.  

It seems clear from the above that if there's an attempt to steal the election for McCain by hacking the electronic vote, Pennsylvania is where it will happen.  In the likelihood that no cyber-savvy governmental or other monitoring is put into place there in time for the election, and Pennsylvania ends up going for McCain, the surest sign that a hack is the likely cause will be if both the final opinion polls and the exit polls show Obama winning by a statistically significant margin; if the exits polls have him winning by 5%, say, and the official results show him losing by 2%, you can pretty much guarantee something's screwy.  

To further test the situation, once the results are in nationwide, compare the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results in Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina with the discrepancy in Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware.  All six states use 100% electronic voting with no paper trails; the first three states listed above are all solidly red, the latter three solidly blue.  If there's little discrepancy between exit polls and final results in the red, but great discrepancies in the blue, or vice versa -- there's your story.

And so what of hacks in Obama's favor?  It could happen, though given his increasingly commanding lead nationwide, the effort would likely be superfluous; I trust it goes without saying that it would be every bit as despicable as hacks in McCain's favor.  But if you really want to go there, you can create your own analysis by comparing the maps at electoral-vote.com and verifiedvoting.org.

The ultimate point of all of the above is simply this:  we need comprehensive inspection and oversight of all paperless electronic voting machines and vote-reporting trunklines before and during the election, and not just after-the-fact analysis when it's too late.  Yet we don't appear to have it anywhere, and there's little chance such monitoring will be put in place in time for the election.  That the Department of Homeland Security would honorably police the situation seems questionable; who would monitor the monitors?

The mainstream media remains all but utterly silent on these issues.  Who will raise the alarm?