“Can I play on the Pac-Man?” Loretta poked the buttons on the arcade game.
“Dere, see, we teachin’ her.” Roark took a handful of cookies and returned to his computer.
“Didn’t we find out that Clancy was on the councilbeforethe machines were purchased?” Jax didn’t bother picking out a cookie.
Another difference, Evie decided. Jax didn’t eat sweets. She probably needed to make sage popsicles for him.
“Again, before my time,” Evie reminded him. “I was more interested in sex behind the stadium than the council. Probably still am.” She grinned, knowing she was irritating him.
As expected, he drew down his dark eyebrows and glared, then returned to typing on his tablet.
Really, this was a totally dead-end relationship—except for that hunka hunka burning lust thing.
Reuben returned with the tea and plastic glasses. She was probably fortunate that he hadn’t just filled his own glass. Obediently, Loretta only filled one for herself and returned to the game.
Evie was going to be a lousy mother. She just knew an Indigo Child needed a wider path for her intellect and abilities than serving drinks to men.
Okay, so now her brain was a Ping-Pong ball. It beat figuring out politics and voting machines.
“Clancy moved his brokerage office from Charleston to Afterthought almost twenty years ago,” Jax verified, reading from his notebook computer. “He joined the council prior to the election that put Mayor Block in place. He brought in Swenson from DVM and persuaded the council to purchase voting machines, said he was getting them a discounted deal because Teddy was an old acquaintance.”
Jax’s biological father had died in a car crash twenty years ago, possibly while attempting to prevent the sales of crooked machines asecondtime. Jax’s aura reflected his rage, so they were on the same wavelength for a change, on this topic at least.
Evie did a swift calculation—Teddy Swenson would have been in his twenties when Jax’s father died in the crash. Presumably, the senator’s firstborn would have been just starting out in DVM/Sovereign. If Donna Ortiz’s only son looked as much like a thug then as he did now, he wouldn’t have made a very impressive salesman. How had he become apolitician?
Connections and crooked machines came to mind.
“Do we have a list of towns using these machines?” Evie slammed another ball just to be hitting something. It ricocheted all over the table.
Roark printed out another list and waved it at her.
Jax, on the other hand, followed the more mechanical path. “Can you prove the machines are rigged? And then can we work out who does the rigging?”
Evie took Roark’s list of towns and Jax’s tablet while the men studied the machine parts and laptop Reuben had set up.
“This PCB is a little more sophisticated than the original Jax found.” Reuben pointed to the circuit board. “But they didn’t change their methods by much. The board has a mechanical flaw. On its own, it can cause a bad count, but it can’tinfluencewho wins. The actual rigging depends on the people designing and uploading the ballot knowing how to manipulate the flaw.”
He held up the electronic screen. Evie could see wires between it and the board and the laptop but didn’t try to figure out the connections. She just listened as she typed with her thumbs.
Reuben turned the screen on to show a ballot with letters A, B, C, D instead of names in the candidate slots. “A voter votes for A and C, hits enter, and the machine counts the vote, right?”
Gnawing on his cookie, Roark reached over and voted for B and D. “Looks normal.”
Loretta wandered over. “Is this what a voting machine looks like? It would be cool to have one for school elections.”
“Don’t touch it, babe. Give me a chance to make it easy.” Reuben voted for A and C three more times.
Roark insisted on voting for his B and D candidates in equal number of times. “OK, now what?”
“Now we look at the machine’s tally. Basically, the machine is just a calculator totaling how many times a button gets pushed. Really basic stuff.” Reuben pushed a button and numbers showed up on the laptop. Even Evie watched—and whistled.
“There were an even four votes for each candidate,” Jax muttered.
“But candidates B&D only tally three and A&C tally five. That’s a crude example, and basically, all it does is mess up the count, not necessarily in favor of anyone—unless someone knows the flaw and programs the ballotso A&C always gets the higher count inallthe machines. Otherwise, half the wacked-out machines might tally B&D as the winners. Just to win one state, it would take alotof bad machines, in a whole lot of towns, and a whole lot of bad people in each town to rig an election. Pretty nigh on impossible since there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of different machines and ways of voting. Still, it might work in one small town with all bad machines, like Afterthought.” Reuben erased the tally. “It’s just a stupid machine. You got to have people colluding to make this happen.”
“Collusionandcrooked machines. That’s a lot of long-term planning.” Obviously out of sorts, Jax returned to reclaim his tablet. “Thirty years of getting machines in place, people in place... No one’s that organized. And it still represents an insignificant percentage of the vote, except in local elections.”
Evie tapped the screen on his tablet. “Look at Roark’s list of towns where they’ve sold machines.” She slid the screen back to her list. “Racial ratios in those towns.” She punchedsendto share the list with the others.