Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports…
Voters using the new machines in Mercer, Greene and Beaver counties on Nov. 2 complained that their votes were voided when they tried to review their choices, which led to long lines at some balloting locations.
Eight counties used the same machines made by UniLect, based in Dublin, Calif., but the voting difficulties were limited to the three counties in Western Pennsylvania.
Misprogrammed electronic voting machines malfunctioned in 4th Congressional District precincts in Shenango Township, West Middlesex, Wheatland, Farrell and Hermitage.
A pencil and a piece of paper hardly ever malfunction.
Not to be a luddite or anything.
UPDATE 1/9/05: From an emailer…for whatever you may decide it’s worth…
MERCER COUNTY PENNSYLVANIA
VOTER REGISTRATION FACTS AS OF 10/26/2004
REGISTERED VOTERS IN MERCER COUNTY
DEMOCRATIC 36,749
REPUBLICAN 31,621
LIBERTARIAN 219
GREEN 105
OTHER 7,379
TOTALS 76,073
MERCER COUNTY, COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA
DEMOCRATIC JOHN F. KERRY . . . . . . . . . . . 47.71%. . 22761
REPUBLICAN GEORGE W. BUSH. . . . . . . . . . . 51.45%. . 24545
——————-
——————-
Greene County historically registers Democrats at a 2:1 ratio to Republicans, this year the registration was slightly less than a 2:1 Democratic advantage.
COUNTY OF GREENE
DEMOCRATIC JOHN F. KERRY/JOHN EDWARDS . . . . . . . . . . 49.30%. . 7674
REPUBLICAN GEORGE W. BUSH /DICK CHENEY . . . . . . . . . . . 50.02%. . 7786
——————-
——————-
Beaver County
Same goes for this county, registration for Democrats is just less than 2:1 advantage over Republicans.
DEMOCRATIC JOHN F. KERRY/JOHN EDWARDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.06%. . 42146
REPUBLICAN GEORGE W. BUSH/DICK CHENEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48.36%. . 39916
YAYY…That starts the ball rolling.
Let’s be sure the folk in PN doing the investigation read what their colleagues in WA State have uncovered:
Links here and here.
Expect that soon, perhaps via velvetrevolution.us, we’ll be able to help our 36+ million fellow citizens, who cast vapor ballots on 2 Nov 2004, realize how important to each of them the Lehto & Hoffman Snohomish County study is.
"When Did Bush Know?"
I was born under Truman, love dominoes, and hate cover-ups and mysteries (until they’re solved).
The probe needs to be nation-wide, AND SOON!
Comment #2 Understandinglife
Hey, great read. I especially loved the part about county workers not being able to run tests on the machines due to contractual obligations. Sequoia’s "trade secrets" are proprietary… blah blah blah. We’ve all heard it a million times. Hopefully the Washington State Dept. will probe the voting machines as Pennsylvania is doing. I’d also love to know how long it will take for the networks and polling companies to analyze the raw data before they can release it. Source code is hidden. Raw exit poll data is hidden. And yet, they wonder why we believe the election was sham.
Yes, a single county, Philadelphia County, PA was the SOLE reason Kerry, or any Democrat for that matter, EVER wins PA.
We need to investigate the blatant fraud in Philadelphia County. PA is a RED state, except for the Southeastern county of Philadelphia!
In fact, take a look at OREGON. A single county, Multnomah, gave Kerry 175,000 votes of the 70,000 Kerry won OREGON by! Oops, this must mean …….yup, it means Oregon, except for Multnomah County, is a RED state!
God Bless the GOP!
yep, this could mark the beginning of several investigations nationwide. it will require, of course, a great deal of nagging on the part of offended and suspicious voters to get their respective AGs and election officials off their butts and on the crimes.
unilect, the foul company in PA, is run by a guy named jack gerbel, who has been known to utter such self-serving and un-democratic tripe as "why are we expected to expose our source code, never heard of such a thing’ to glenda hood, and ‘i agree we need to focus on changing public perception of e-vote systems’ in a conference call with other e-vote execs seeking to deal with public concerns (don’t fix the system, fix the perception of it; great gop rationale!). unilect also uses machinery manufactured by…guess who…Triad of OH!
this silly fetish about more red counties = red state…. yet more evidence of how little gop supporters understand democracy. last i checked, what renders a county or state one color or another is not the land mass or geographical boundaries, but instead the INDIVIDUAL VOTES! logic therefore dictates that more densely populated counties, even when they are geographically smaller than some sparsely populated counties, will necessarily dominate the color of the whole state because those densely populated areas have more INDIVIDUALS, thus representing more VOTES. the same logic holds on the state level; even though alaska represents more land mass than any other state, it gets fewer of those red votes than most others, and thought CA is not our largest state by land mass, it is home to more voters than any other state. i know this might seem complicated, but it surely is the basis of democracy.
and boy do i agree with brad: paper all the way. in fact, we need to see to it that we keep our hands on the votes every step of the way, from the vote to the count:
HANDS ON VOTING!!!
just think what it would mean if each and every precinct certified their count, done by a multipartisan election panel; we could then each of us get out our calculators and add up all the precincts in the entire US and – theoretically anyway – arrive at the same number!!
they do it elsewhere, like canada and germany, why not here? and in those countries, the ballot counts typically fall within .1% of the exit poll results.
just because we started the idea (sorta), doesn’t mean we’ll always do it best. and moreover, progress is not always good and machines are not always better.
One thing we need to investigate is the use of criminals to program the voting machines.
Diebold’s chief programmer for its voting machines used in Ohio and elsewhere (not California – they were rejected) was convicted of 23 counts of computer fraud involving embedded spy routines in software he developed. See chapter 8.
Another criminal became a friend of his and was brought on board while he was doing time for drug traffic.
This software was used in Ohio and other places we have witnessed strange results.
In the new laws it should be illegal for anyone convicted of felonies to work on voting software.
Here is a significant passage from the pdf report on the Snohomish County (Washington) investigation…
"Thanks to mathematician Arlene Ash, we calculate that the chances that above 2/3 of the vote that is paper balloting would show a Democratic lead of 97044 to 95228 votes, while the remaining 1/3 of the vote on touch screens would show a Republican lead of almost 5% (50,400 Republican to 42,145 Democratic) resulting in an overall Republican win of over 6000 votes in Snohomish county AS A RESUST OF VOTERS RANDOMLY CHOOSING WHETHER TO VOTE BY PAPER BALLOT OR BY TOUCH SCREEN is one in 1,000 trillion! A true impossibility. "
The emphasis that I have capitalized was in the report as italics.
This is the same race the neos were crying fraud after the recount?
Be careful what you wish for… and don’t touch that domino. oh shit!
LOL, torqued! (#4) Another "domino theory"! We haven’t had a good "domino theory" in a long time. 😉
Yea was born under Eisenhower and I love dominos!
{ed. note: Another wholly unrelated comment deleted. Knock it off, Atty Jimmo.}
Exit polls are said to be old wives tales by neo-cons at the historic objection on Jan 6 a few days back.
Yet the experts keep using exit polls to predict outcomes because they are quite reliable.
The exit polls were as accurate as they’ve always been. Even Dick Morris, who spoke before he realised what had REALLY taken place, said that exit polls are extremely reliable in predicting elections.
They are. Electronic votes were hacked. It’s simple logic, not fantasy, regardless of what any jack-ass below in this thread tries to claim.
Bob (#15) wrote : "It’s simple logic, not fantasy, regardless of what any jack-ass below in this thread tries to claim."
Easy, Bob! Don’t forget the jackass above! LOL.
Good grief, jim-the-bean, STILL on the Clinton thing! LOL!!!!
"Hillary Clinton’s public life reads like an instruction manual for breaking the rules."
HILLARY CLINTON’S public life??
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Where does one even BEGIN with THAT one!!!!!!!
To all my friends at Bradblog:
"Exit Polls" are only as good as the people taking the exit polls, and it is obvious those taking and "reporting" the exit polls early in the 2004 race were more INTENT on building momentum for Kerry than ACCURACY!
Your guy lost, our guy won: get over it.
Go smoke some more weed, then come back and type a rambling nonsensical reply that sounds brilliant until you come down.
One doesnt, Joan. The wholly off-topic comment has been removed. As will any other further attempts by Apologist Jimmo to distract from topics that he’s unable to answer to on behalf of his puppet-masters in the GOP.
As to Apologist Jimmo’s mostly on-topic comments about these so-called "red states" if you simply don’t count all the people in them, and instead track property owned, sure sounds Anti-American to me.
Odd how Republicans these days seem to not be in favor of Government by the people and for the people, but more like by the King and his Land Barons, for the King and his Land Barons.
And then there’s the issue of those Blue States giving far more in Taxes than they get back.
Apologist Jim’s Red States are apparently Welfare Whores sucking off the Government Tax Tit.
And yet he’s in favor of it! Go figure. It’s almost as if he has no principles whatsoever or something. But I’m sure that couldn’t be the case…
Jimmo,
You need to go see all those RED STATES Adolf Hitler won back in Germany! Nothing like getting all your rural evangelicals and racists to come vote RED, like in RED CHINA, crawling out to vote for their right-wing "Communist"…oops!…excuse me…I mean Dominionist! Of course, assuming that’s what actually happened in their vote rigging scheme?
Gee! or NEE! So was that the trade deal Jim? We roll over for their "commie" spies and they help with our little electronic election problem? Hear you yelling plenty about Comminists in Cuba and Vietnam, but you’re just a little peep squeak when it comes to China!
Sure don’t want to ruffle our Republican "commie" friends, now do we? After all, they’re becoming our largest creditors for Wars and Walmarts! Isn’t that right Jim? So let’s play pretend democracy in Iraq while the prison camps, labor camps, and torture chambers churn for the Republicans in RED CHINA, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere!
Yes sir (or madam)! Welcome to the Republican right-wing phony spin machine, where you mix a little blogging and hypocrisy to make BULLSHIT! Or is that JIMSHIT?
Sorry, no prose tonight. 🙂
Freebird
{ed. note: Off-topic and the full posting of an article as previously warned against. Post deleted.}
There’s an easy response to that article Jimmo! As long as Republicans are stealing elections to stay in power, they then have the ability to quash any "good idea" the Democrats try to raise. After all, all the "good ideas" the writer is talking about are actually written by corporate lobbyists and their corrupt lawyers. Go see "THE AVIATOR" with Leonardo di Caprio about Howard Hughes, and see how are Congress really works!
Add a little help from a corporate controlled right-wing media, a Military Industrial Complex, Christian Dominionists, and their voting machine companies…and hey…you have all sorts of good ideas:
War and mass murder in Iraq a good idea?
Allow Osama bin Laden to attack America on 9/11 a good idea?
Torture and violating international law a good idea?
Overthrow Democratically elected governments a good idea?
Medicare Prescription Drug rip-off a good idea?
Destruction of environmental protections a good idea?
Social Security investment scam a good idea?
Patriot Act destruction of constitutional protections a good idea?
A widening gap between rich and poor, with an increase in those without health care a good idea?
Multi-trillion dollar deficit a good idea?
Corruption of elections and democracies a good idea?
Underfunded no child left behind a good idea?
Making America a Christian Theocracy a good idea?
Gee! Why didn’t I think of all those good ideas? LOL Republicans control to crush any good Democratic ideas and compromises. Knowing full well that to give Democrats credit for their work would mean a loss for Republicans, no matter how worthy the legislation! They sit in their member only conferences and lock out Democrats and Independents, and therefore lock out the representation of millions of Americans. The Democrats do the same when they’re in power!
But I think you’ve already seen here Jim, and have also really misread, we’re not interested in saving Democrats or Republicans. Come the REVOLUTION, they’ll all be looking for new jobs!
Viva la Revolucion!
Freebird
PS: The guy that wrote that sorry article actually works for a major news organization? Oh that’s right…that "liberal" mainstream corporate press! I forgot!
PS2: Let’s just write that the lunatic fringe and left-wing conspiracy theorists are behind all this election theft stuff and ignore all the evidence! So America, it’s okay, you can go back to sleep now! Republicans and their media have everything under control! Good night children!
And the guy that submitted that sorry piece is actually an "attorney"? Oh that’s right…one of those "fair and balanced" right-wingers who would rather conceal than reveal the evidence! I know the type…dealt with them many times!
While we ponder how we can possibly effect a change towards good, a piece by John Pilger, "The Other Tsunami" presents a horrifying look at our government’s & others’ bloody hands while also offering a glimmer of hope:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010905Z.shtml
Beautiful graphic, Brad. But according to the Dixiecrat theory, Southern Democrats usually don’t vote for Northeast Liberals…. Oh, wait. Pennsylvania is part of the Northeast. Yikes, how are the spin happy media gonna explain this one? I know. Dixiecrat movement surges Northward. Or maybe they won’t report it at all. Either way, the story begins to unfold.
Exit polls work except when Bush/Cheney are running.
"Isn’t that special?"