On today’s BradCast we examine what the big Super Tuesday wins mean, and don’t, for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as well what the media is both misreporting and failing to report at all. [Audio linked below.]
First, the GOP is now in full panic mode following Trump’s seven-state victory yesterday, as the DNC and corporate media use misleading numbers to describe Clinton’s own seven-state victory. In addition to the general horse-race numbers, and the Republican drama, we examine how the MSM continues to ill-serve the public in their coverage of the Democratic race to date, specifically when it comes to the unpledged so-called “SuperDelegates”.
We also look at a few more of the more than 2,000 reports of voting problems that came into the non-partisan Election Protection coalition yesterday; More touch-screen trouble, this time in TN; And what the hell happened in Chelsea, MA, where former VA Gov. Jim Gilmore(!?!), who dropped out of the race weeks ago, crushed the Republican Primary competition, at least according to the paper-ballot optical-scan computers that tallied the results last night?…
The paper ballots in Chelsea were initially tabulated by the same type of op-scan systems used in states all over the country and shown to be capable of flipping elections without notice in the jaw-dropping finale of HBO’s Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy. Today, the numbers have now been “corrected” [PDF] by the clerk’s office [Update: The link to the document at the Chelsea government site is now broken, so here’s a copy of the PDF that had been linked there] and, apparently, chalked up to “the computer system that reported the results”. Ya don’t say. Was it anything like this similar failure from Stoughton, WI in 2014?
Also today: Listener email in response to my interview earlier this week with Current Affairs magazine editor Nathan J. Robinson, who had offered his persuasive case, based on his recent feature article, for why Trump is likely to win the Presidency if Democrats fail to nominate Bernie Sanders. We look at the arguments from a number of you who disagreed with Robinson.
Finally: A short, but refreshing break from politics as Scott Kelly, the American astronaut who has been in space for the past year, returns safely to Earth with his Russian counterpart in furtherance of NASA’s planned manned missions to Mars…
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.
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.
Duct tape and plastic on sale (The Donald University vs. The Lord GOP University)
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.
Interesting. The Chelsea municipal link above, which presumably would explain what happened, no longer works.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.