Cindy McCain in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Reports of anomalies with ES&S iVotronic machines in West Virginia early voting, involving vote flipping in favor of the Republican candidate for president, brings to mind a story covered on Brad Blog from April 2007.

A commenter over at DU asked which states used the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system found vulnerable to an undetectable countywide vote-flipping virus which can be implanted by a single person, as we reported this morning.

Based on our quick review of a county-by-county database of voting systems, sorted by state, as made available by Common Cause (EXCEL spreadsheet downloadable here) just prior to the November 2006 elections, it looks like the answer is 16 states in total.

The Excel spreadsheet shows the following states using iVotronic devices:

• Arkansas
• Florida
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Missouri
• New jersey
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Pennsylvania
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin

The states bolded are regarded as battleground or tipping point states on the national level. Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin were earlier battleground areas that are now presumed to have gone over to the Democratic ticket. Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver is reporting that West Virginia seems to have gone decidedly towards the Republican ticket:

Well, scratch West Virginia from the swing state list for the time being. Both Public Policy Polling and Mason-Dixon have new polling out in the state, and they give John McCain leads of 8 and 6 points respectively. It’s possible that this is one of those areas where McCain’s attacks on Barack Obama are having some resonance. It’s also possible that the state was never all that close to begin with, and that the ARG poll from two weeks ago that gave Obama a substantial lead was one of those infamous ARG outliers. By no means is the state totally unwinnable for Obama — and I’d still like to see what, say, Research 2000 or Rasmussen or SurveyUSA have to say about it — but in all probability, it is pretty far from the tipping point.

The Pew Foundation has a web site devoted to election integrity that includes a page listing links to voting systems used by state. The two counties in West Virginia reporting vote-flipping machines are using the iVotronic system as shown on the page for that state. BlackBoxVoting.org forums fairly regularly update information of this type.

The return to Pennsylvania of the McCain campaign this weekend is a signal that the state is still in play contrary to the conventional wisdom. McCain’s surrogate, Cindy, traveled through areas that Hillary Clinton had commanded during the primaries, hoping, apparently, to attract PUMAs there in sufficient quantities to tip the state towards them. Most notably, Sarah Palin, was not dispatched there, most likely for the same reason.

The counties of interest have a varying mix of e-voting devices deployed. Most notably, Luzerne County, Biden country, is equipped with ES&S iVotronic devices. Lehigh and Carbon counties have the Premier AccuVote TSX machines. Bucks county has the Danaher 1242 which seems to be subject to chronic malfunctions. The prospects of these devices playing a role in tipping the state away from Obama is moot if the assumption that areas west of Lehigh valley will go largely Republican is wrong.