READER COMMENTS ON
"What Actually Happened (and Didn't) On Super Tuesday: 'BradCast' 3/2/2016"
(10 Responses so far...)
COMMENT #1 [Permalink]
...
CambridgeKnitter
said on 3/2/2016 @ 8:56 pm PT...
Those are not the results the Boston Globe is currently reporting for Chelsea (a city, by the way). According to the Globe, Trump got 466 votes, Kasich got 85 votes, and others (why were the others lumped together? maybe because the Globe endorsed Kasich and even asked independents to take Republican ballots and vote for Kasich) got 220. There's a story on boston.com (affiliated with the Globe, sort of) that says he actually got only two votes in Chelsea, and the error was most likely that the computer reported results one line off.
COMMENT #2 [Permalink]
...
Brad Friedman
said on 3/2/2016 @ 9:36 pm PT...
CK -
As noted, the clerk has "corrected" the results, though beyond "computer error", not many details on what that error was...and if other races (and towns, etc.) were affected.
COMMENT #3 [Permalink]
...
Dredd
said on 3/3/2016 @ 11:15 am PT...
COMMENT #4 [Permalink]
...
Virginia Martin
said on 3/4/2016 @ 7:10 am PT...
Well, that’s interesting that the BOE corrected its results. On what basis? Did they hand count the ballots, or did they just infer that Gilmore’s numbers "must be" Trump’s? That does not instill confidence.
A recount (or a full count, in the first place, which is what we do in Columbia County, NY) isn’t that expensive and doesn’t take that long. It’s about 1% of our total budget and is completed easily within a week. Chump change to make sure the results are correct AND to instill confidence.
COMMENT #5 [Permalink]
...
Virginia Martin
said on 3/4/2016 @ 11:12 am PT...
Interesting. The Chelsea municipal link above, which presumably would explain what happened, no longer works.
COMMENT #6 [Permalink]
...
Brad Friedman
said on 3/4/2016 @ 3:02 pm PT...
Virginia Martin @4&5:
Happy that I saved a copy of that PDF that was lnked at the Chelsea government site. I'll replace the now-broken link above with the version of the "corrected" document I saved myself (for just this reason). Here's that PDF.
As to the rest, I've still not been able to get an explanation myself from Chelsea for any of it, as I note in my follow up on that (and a few related items) at the top of Thursday's program.
I continue to send my thanks to you and your co-election director in Columbia, NY. Wish every jurisdiction was as respectful to voters to have the courtesy to hand-count paper ballots as you guys are!
COMMENT #7 [Permalink]
...
CambridgeKnitter
said on 3/5/2016 @ 8:07 pm PT...
One possibility that occurs to me is that just one ward got messed up, which could explain why the total number of ballots is correct, but the numbers aren't transposed. Maybe the numbers were one line off at only some of the polling places (it looks as though each ward has four precincts, so it could have been one ward's worth of polling places). I don't know how independent Chelsea's Board of Registrars is, nor am I familiar with Chelsea's new city manager (they lost their long-time manager, Jay Ashe, to the Baker administration) and how tight his control over city government is. The one thing I am reasonably certain about is that no one hand-counted anything because that would have been news. The Chelsea Record doesn't even appear to have a story on this. I wonder if anyone did what I do most elections and went to the precincts when voting closed to write down the numbers or take a picture of the tape. It is curious.
COMMENT #8 [Permalink]
...
CambridgeKnitter
said on 3/8/2016 @ 2:43 pm PT...
I was at a meeting this morning where the new City Manager of Chelsea, Tom Ambrosino, was one of the speakers, so I buttonholed him before he could leave. After a few words about the importance of election integrity to people's faith in the legitimacy of their government, I asked about the messed up election results. According to him, the vendor misprogrammed the software for the central tabulator (he used different words, but this is what I understood that he was referring to) so that it put the results for a few precincts on the wrong lines. They noticed that the results seemed wrong, so they got the precinct tapes and added them up. Those were the corrected results that they reported. To test their hypothesis, they took the memory cards (I think that's what he meant by the term powerpacks) to Revere, which uses the same machines (and where he used to be the mayor), and the results matched the precinct tapes.
It was obvious to me that he doesn't really understand this stuff. For example, he blamed the age of the machines for the problems, even though it appears to be a software failure, not a hardware failure. He also doesn't seem fazed by how hackable all of the machines are. I strongly encouraged him to make sure that whoever in his office is looking at new machines researches the reliability and hackability problems, not just the literature from the vendors. He feels hemmed in by the approved list of machines from the Secretary of the Commonwealth and can't imagine hand counting ballots. Sigh.
COMMENT #9 [Permalink]
...
Brad Friedman
said on 3/9/2016 @ 5:13 pm PT...
Excellent report, CK! Thank you! I hope you'll not mind if I use that on the air soon! (Would do it immediately, but that I'm stuck covering debates between here and the weekend, I think.)
Good work. I could never get a call back from him!
COMMENT #10 [Permalink]
...
CambridgeKnitter
said on 3/9/2016 @ 8:04 pm PT...
Feel free to use it. He has a lot to deal with that feels more pressing, and, as I said, he doesn't seem to get the real issues with the machines.