We’re crawling through tons of election-related problem reports (thanks to VotersUnite’s early report, and those of you emailers and commenters) this morning from all over the state, and all over the country. Trying to make sense of as many of them as possible. Confirm them, seek out more details, etc. It’s really a matter of triage at this point.
Many of you, in other threads, have been sharing experiences and concerns from the polling place yesterday, or have come across troubling reports from the news media, etc.
Feel free to repost and/or add new comments here in this thread, as we continuing to sift through the rubble, so that we might be able to continuing collecting some of the reports, and allowing for others here to dig into them as well. There seems to be more than enough work to go around today. Again. And unfortunately…
Speaking of super wednesday votes with bullets, Senator Inouye (D-HI) cast his 15,000th vote in the Senate a short while ago.
He is a Japanese American, you know, the ones who were put in prison camps by “patriots” during WWII.
He advocated for a Japanese American unit and became a leader in that unit. It ended up being the most decorated unit in American Military history.
He vote “yes” to sunsetting FISA in 4 years … if it passes. He is against the things he fought against … totalitarianism.
Yet the senate leader Reid, required that there be 60 votes for it to pass. The vote was 49-46 … so it would have passed but for Reidism.
What is Reid’s f**king problem? How many dems are going to become demoCons?
As goes FISA so goes the nation … already at the 8 count … two to go … keep up the energetic effort to wake the downed America up … a stranger Amurka is walking around claiming to be her …
JW had a very interesting post I am reposting here:
(JW Bradblog post, from this HuffPost).
It is my understanding that San Diego County’s ROV Debra Seiler is a former rep for Diebold/Premier. It’s also my understanding that there’s a group of ROVs suing CA SoS Debra Bowen because she decertified Premier’s voting machines.
How can we find out how many and which of CAs ROVs are actually “plants” who have infiltrated our ROVs offices?
If we don’t stop this now, every county in CA will end up like LA County. Connie McCormick, former Diebold rep and LA County ROV, is likely the reason LA is having the integrity problems it’s experiencing post-Feb. 5.
I guess your work includes a look at how the betting market firmed up dramatically for Hillary at the last minute?
Just a Super Tuesday thought or two:
The voting machine distributor and operator LHS Associates responsible for overseeing and co-administering the New Hampshire primary and participating in the,thus far, debacle and farce known as the recount is headquartered in Massachusetts.
So far,we know that in New Hampshire the Clinton campaign benefited immensely from the discrepancies in the districts where the votes were machine counted apparently so much that it defied all pre polls and exit polls and produced a much needed victory.
With that scenario in mind, I look at the Massachusetts primary and I see that Clinton won by a relatively comfortable margin this despite the fact that Obama received ringing endorsements from the Kennedys,Kerry, and Governor Patrick.
I believe that Massachusetts also uses LHS machines for most of their districts with ES&S involved in some with their unrecountable touchscreens.
To my mind,knowing what I now know,this raises quite a few red flag suspicions as to whether or not Massachusetts was victimized by election shenanigans of a similar nature as New Hampshire.
If I were an election official or an EI advocate in Massachusetts,I would certainly want to give it a closer look.
A thought occurred to me that one of the things the movement wants is already a centuries old American tradition. Consider the jury “vote verification” and “paper trail”.
When a jury returns a verdict (the vote tally) the judge, like an election official, reads the results.
Is that the end of it?
No.
The defendant or prosecutor (like candidates) can ask for verification! In fact, the request has the effect of a demand!
The jury can be (must be) polled in open court … yep publicly … each one is asked “is that your vote” and they must answer yes or no.
That is pure American vote verification!
We do not have to take the judges word for it, the jury foreman’s word for it, or what is written down in the tally given to the judge to read out loud. No, faith has no part of it!
We can demand verification!!! Proof!!!
reposting this from an earlier thread, hoping that maybe a computer programmer with knowledge of op-scans might be able to illuminate:
I can see having the ‘double bubble’ for statistical purposes — I don’t know the rationale behind that requirement, but I can understand somebody might’ve thought it’d be neat to track how many voters “crossed over” from DTS to vote for the Dems for statistical purposes.
But it defies logic that the precinct-level op-scan ballot readers are apparently NOT programmed to spit that ballot back out as an error when the ‘double bubble’ for a DTS voter is NOT filled in. (I am not a programmer, so perhaps there’s a perfectly good reason for it on that particular system.) The double bubble doesn’t appear on the Dem ballot.
Yet the central tabulator will apparently NOT COUNT any DTS ballot voting in the Dem primary unless the ‘double bubble’ is filled in. The whole point of the precinct-level op-scans (I thought) was to catch errors so the voter can correct them.
I wonder if anyone previously mentioned this disconnect in the programming for these two devices. I also wonder if the machines record any stats on how many ballots get spit back out at the precinct-level.
Ghandi in #4,
Can you provide a link to the betting market that shows the shift to Hillary at the last minute?
That would be kind of like insider trading and very, very interesting…
What I’ve found so far is here:
http://www.intrade.com/
And it will take someone besides me to figure out what it means.
DES #7
The software that controls machines can be programmed so as to do anything the machine can do.
When studying what went right or wrong, broad based input should be utilized to detect patterns. Then the software that was working in the machines should be looked at … because that is easier than just looking at the code first … it is a vast forest and seeing one tree in there can be a daunting task.
Competent hackers are not going to be discovered, period, under current detection techniques in the election realm.
At work in Alaska once, I planted a program as a trick on a buddy of mine working in the accounting department. His father was a minister so he was apt to believe some … er … strange things. (I don’t know if there was a link … 😉 )
But the program had a time detector in it and at precisely closing time (a weak time cause everyone wants out of there in a hurry) … less a minute or so … the program activated.
It sent a loud siren sound thru the office, put a dialog box up that said the computer had been invaded by outside aliens, and a safety mechanism was about to be activated to destroy the invaders … “Press the destroy button to activate the safety mechanism” …
Believe it or not the mature accountant was so surprised by this event that he fell for it. Other people in the office told me that the siren drew every one’s attention, and they watched him put his face really close to the screen so as to read it carefully, then cautiously his finger neared the mouse … and he pressed it and kinda jumped back …
The program them praised him for saving the data and promptly disappeared without a trace.
I still laugh about it … but there is a serious side to it too … SOFTWARE can cause a machine to DO ANYTHING that machine can do so long as there is some interface to the trigger mechanisms of that machine.
New Mexico manages to fuck things up…
Apparently some of the 16,000 or so provisional ballots spent the night at the election official’s home in Rio Arriba County.
Soul Rebel #10, so what happens when something like that occurs? The security protocol for handling ballots is very clear. After 16,000 ballots, provisional or otherwise, have “spent the night at the election official’s home,” they can no longer be verified as reflecting the will of the voters. What happens to them? And what happens to the election official?
Linda,
It’s an extremely tight race, literally neck and neck before those provisionals have been counted. In terms of making sure the correct candidate wins, the best we can hope for is that the provisional ballots in the rest of the state clearly define a winner. If not, there’s a real kerfuffle in the offing…and as far as the Rio Arriba election official, I can’t thing anything other than they are looking for another position. Criminal acts, I’m not so sure…but on the grounds of complete idiocy, the dude must go.
There were long lines in many places yesterday, I managed to get in and out inside of ten minutes, but people were faced with 3 or 4 hour lines in Rio Rancho (sort of a suburb of Albuquerque, fairly affluent place in Sandoval County) because they had only a single polling location for the entire city.
I know the Dem state chair, and he is a good guy with very honest intentions. I don’t blame any mishaps on him, I’m sure he did the absolute best he could in delegating responsibility and letting election officials know what the rules and regulations are surrounding chain of custody of ballots. Some people are just idiots.
The ‘deal’ between Reid and McConnell was that some FISA amendments would require 60 votes if McConnell would allow the telecom immunity amendments to pass with only 50+1 votes.
Given that Bush Has a ‘bully pulpit'(mass media whose owners are to say politely, deferential to him) that is hard to equal, I would say Reid is doing his best in a very difficult situation.
NOT that I agree with his approach, but to blame everything on him alone is not accurate; just think of Pelosi who agrees to a stimulus bill with Bush and the Republican’s but never really involves her members until after the fact; she operates from the principle that ‘getting something done’ is what citizen’s want, not recognizing that ‘something’ that isn’t the most effective is but a cave-in to the Bush administration.
One of the local San Francisco Bay Area TV news broadcasts last night reported that something like 11 of 207 precincts in Alameda County ran out of Democratic ballots. Legal action was filed, I believe by Obama’s people. The court denied a request to keep the polls open longer, but Secretary of State Debra Bowen overruled the court and kept the polls open in those precincts until 10pm.
There is no excuse for running out of ballots. Given what has been happening across the country, they knew turnout was going to be huge.
Not factoring in turnout trends is not a “mistake.”
Des,
The PBR’s only read overvotes, not undervotes. 25 million dollars of taxpayer money spent by our supervisors and that is all they do. (They tally, and they have modems, but failed all the tests.)In addition, at a meeting at the registrar’s office 2 weeks before the election, I pointed out after only 30 minutes of pollworker training (for EP groups monitoring the election) that this extra hole to fill in could easily desenfranchise voters. If it was that obvious to me in 30 minutes, I’m pretty sure it must have occurred to those who designed the ballot/election. And, if it didn’t occur to them, they were warned at least 2 weeks before the election, and could have prevented this fiasco if they wanted to.
#15 Badger
I agree that there is some level of responsibility with the State Democratic Party….however, there was almost a 50% increase in voter turnout from 2004 AND a large proportion of voters in 2004 used absentee ballots and this did not happen this year. Polls were kept open past the 7pm deadline for voters still in line.
140,000 people voted in the NM caucus. Regardless of incidences, this is a good sign, and I’m sure the state party will do whatever it can to make sure this won’t happen again. New Mexico is turning blue.