After the local Republican party shut down the primary process and selected the liberal — and sometime Workers Family Party candidate — Dede Scozzafava to run against Owens; conservative Republicans in that district were left in the unlikely position of having to choose either the Republican or the less liberal candidate in the race. As some of conservative’s front line activists, RedStaters were quick to embrace Doug Hoffman — the one-time GOP primary nominee hopeful — who was locked out of the system and now running for the Conservative party.

Heading into the special elections a couple of weeks ago, Doug Hoffman went from a “divisive” thorn in the side of the Republican establishment, to a veritable champion of the conservative base of the Republican party. Once Scozzafava’s liberal (and not; moderate at all) positions became widely known, her popularity (locally and nationally) tanked; and it soon became clear that she could not be elected.

As the vote neared, Scozzafava — no longer able to win — realized that she was splitting votes away from her favored candidate (the Democrat), and dropped out. Interestingly, it seemed to matter little: Doug Hoffman, with broad national support and a surprising amount of local appeal, was steam-rolling his way to victory in both 2-way and 3-way contests. In what appeared at the time to be a major strategic blunder, Scozzafava’s Republican betrayal (the national party injected hundreds of thousands of dollars into her campaign coffers in an absurd attempt to help her win) did little but validate long-held skepticism of such faux Republicanism (to paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, “she screwed every RINO in the country”).

But then, a funny thing happened; when early returns began flowing in, Hoffman was severely under-performing in some of his best districts. We (RedStaters) watched with interest and dismay as his In-Trade numbers plummeted. It wasn’t long before he conceded defeat. As could have been predicted; Owens, just a few hours after being sworn in, completely backtracked on several of his campaign pledges and voted soon after for the abominable Obama Care bill in the house that he had promised to oppose.

Every election has anomalies; and NY-23 was no different. Hoffman’s terrible performance in his best districts? A technical glitch. More surprisingly, he got no votes at all in several districts. Election officials quickly “corrected” the problems; and, not surprisingly, Owens still won.

It is time to issue a federal subpoena to find out exactly how officials “corrected” the vote.

Why, you may ask?

Because, as we learned yesterday, at least some of the certified electronic voting machines in the NY-23 congressional special election were discovered to be running malicious code (a virus) in the week prior to voting. We now hear word that election officials, after cleaning only the identified machines, took no further action to re-certify other voting machines in the district.

Although the technical nature of such a virus is interesting; it is difficult to adequately explain in article format. For the technical minded, the programming technique (called return-oriented programming) utilized is described here; while the application of this technique is described here (h/t Scope).

For the layman, I’ll simply list a few facts regarding the virus:

1. The virus could only have been implanted after the voting machine was installed into the polling centers and the machines turned on at least once.

2. The virus was implanted by an operative with direct, physical access to the voting machines.

3. The virus is eliminated only when power is completely removed, and not necessarily when the machine is “turned off”.

4. The virus works not by “injecting” new code into the system, but by confusing the system by piecing together valid code fragments to form a new code (for example, a vote for Hoffman could become a vote for either no one or a vote for Owens; but the attacker is quite limited in their ability to, for example, generate a random number). Therefore, given the exact virus code run on each affected machine, it would be quite easy to reconstruct the true vote.

While the story certainly begins well (after workers discovered a problem, they were able to eliminate the infection with the help of the manufacturer and the machines were recertified), election officials did something inexplicable: rather than reset and recertify all of the voting machines, they took no further action.

Any curiosity at all into the nature of the virus — for example, by simply asking the manufacturer — would have quickly revealed the facts that I have enumerated above. The perpetrator(s) had physical access to the machines (that is, possibly poll workers or administrators), and an express intent of manipulating the vote. Therefore, without being able to identify the source of the virus, the only reasonable course of action of election officials would have been to immediately perform the power cycling procedure on all voting machines to eliminate the virus and provide outside physical security for all machines to prevent reinfection. As far as we know right now, they did neither.

Which brings me back to my point about that innocuous little technical glitch. The workers reporting vote totals in those districts (in which Hoffman received no votes) apparently didn’t find this information worthy of propagating to the Hoffman campaign prior to his concession; which must, in retrospect, present at least some cause for concern.

Without the code (as point #3 indicates, once power is removed from the machines, all traces of the offending code is permanently destroyed), it is now impossible to reconstruct the true vote total. Not only do we not know which, if any, machines were infected; we can not know what the parameters of the virus were (for example, the percentage of Hoffman votes which were either discarded or became Owens votes could have varied from polling place to polling place), although we can begin to piece this information together by comparing the number of paper signatures at the polling places with the number of votes.

However, the most important thing to know now is how election officials reconstructed Hoffman’s vote total in the districts in which he received no votes, as well as where his vote was initially under-reported.

If the lack of Hoffman votes in those district could have been caused by the virus, then the election official’s reaction and actions taken would indicate whether they were complicit in election fraud. The most likely way that they might have reconstructed the Hoffman vote would be to take the total number of voters and subtract off the Owen’s vote (and some percentage of misvotes), because the actual vote would have either been lost (or even more damning, calculable only with an intimate knowledge of the workings of the virus).

It is vitally important to verify how they came up with the Hoffman vote total — as this could not only implicate those potentially guilty of the fraud — but also whether Hoffman votes became Owens votes or whether Hoffman votes were being dropped and help forensically reconstruct the true results of the election.

As they like to say, it’s not the crime, but the cover-up.

If the Hoffman votes were simply dropped, it might still be possible to estimate the true Hoffman vote from the total number of voters (based on the number of signatures on the paper sign-in forms). Unfortunately, without using properly certified machines or having a detailed record of which machines were infected and (precisely) what they were infected with, it is impossible to say for sure who won the election (whether the tainted total shows Owens by 1 vote or 1 million).

Note: will update with links a little later this morning (sorry!)