Election Alert: Machines Alter Election in Iowa: Help needed! Now!

From:

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16751509&BRD=2703&PAG=461&dept_id=555106&rfi=6

Pottawattamie county election will be recounted because the machines there were found to change the count of the absentee ballots.

The machines said 99 to 79
Hand count said 153 to 25

So, ALL the votes in this county will be hand counted.

This could be the most important story in Tuesday's elections.

If there is anybody in or near to Pottawattamie county, can you be the person on the ground to check this story out? I will pay a 100 bucks in expenses to any one who can.

PM me by using the link above. About me, BeFree: I have been following election matters on DU for three years now. Recently in the DU Election Reform Forum. This matter is, in my opinion, one of the most important stories of the day, especially now after Robert Kennedy Jr. has spoken out on election fraud.

I posted about this earlier here in the Iowa forum. I'm a member of an election watchdog group here in Iowa; unfortunately, we are all located in the eastern portion of the state and the county in question is on the other side. There is discussion going on now (in the group) about the problems there and elsewhere. (i.e., in tests prior to the election on a Diebold TSx one of our people entered a ballot for a gubernatorial candidate which was missing in the final tally)

I'll let you know if I hear/learn more.

be interested in - is there a site for watchdog group?

Op-Scan Machines Miscount Iowa Republican Race! Hand Count Reversed!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1383500&mesg_id=1383500

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16757670&BRD=2703&PAG=461&dept_id=555106&rfi=6

"Meanwhile, the cause of Tuesday's computer counting errors has been determined, said county deputy auditor Gary Herman.

According to Herman, the names of those in multiple candidate races are rotated in each precinct, so that one candidate won't be at the top of the list in all precincts. For example, one candidate's name might be at the top of the list in one precinct, but in the middle or at the bottom of the list in another precinct to avoid voter fraud, Herman said. The computers that read the ballots after they were completed were not programmed to recognize the different order for precincts, he said.

"They always alternate the listings to prevent voter fraud, but the computer didn't read it correctly," Knauss said. "I'm assuming it kept everything in alphabetical order."

Because of the programming error, some surprising numbers were tabulated in Tuesday's election before County Auditor Marilyn Jo Drake ordered a quick hand recount of absentee ballots that showed big differences. A hand recount of all the ballots was then held Wednesday."

<more at link>

So now the story is, after ES&S got to the machines, that the programming was wrong. No kidding. The idea is that the ballots were made out differently "as they always have been" for each precinct.

But, the problem first arose when the absentee ballots were counted by the machines.

We are being lead to believe the absentees were sorted by precinct.

We need someone from there to get to the bottom of this, now.

The local auditor looked at the absentee ballot totals (which were NOT sorted by precinct -- they are treated as their own precinct and are always the first counted) thought they were odd because someone she knew as a very popular candidate was behind a little-known newcomer.

Pottawattamie continued to machine count 28 precincts before halting... because at that point, the popular candidate was only ahead by two votes.

Here in Iowa -- where we have almost 20 of our 99 counties already strictly DRE with no paper trail -- the story here is: "HAD THIS PROBLEM HAPPENED IN ONE OF THE 'NO PAPER' COUNTIES THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO RECOURSE."

This very popular Republican Recorder John Sciortino needs to have a chat with Iowa's Republican leadership who have been doing everything in their power to keep from having to add verifiable paper trails to Iowa voting machines. Had it not been for the paper trail, Mr. Sciortino would be sitting at home, wondering what happened with no way to find out.

Indeed, were the absentee ballots not differently arranged?

It makes no sense to me that they would be, so if what you are saying is true, then the machines had NO excuse like the one given.

Not doubting your words, CornField, just trying to make sure i understand.

That is, they are handled as a group and are the first ballots fed into the machine.

Had this been a typical race (with two or more viable candidates) it is doubtful the issues with the machine would have been caught at all. (Which is why I want to get a list of the M100 totals and the manual totals from each race. Also why we are now looking into requesting recounts in other counties which use ES&S OS.)

Consider this:

You are an auditor watching the totals from the Democratic gubernatorial primary. When you send the absentee group through the OS, you notice that Sal Mohamed has received the largest majority of the votes. Knowing that Sal, although a nice man, was only polling at 1% going into election day, this would cause you to pause. As more precincts are totaled, you see this trend continue... at that point you have enough evidence to suspect that something is wrong with the count.

That is the scenario of what happened in Pottawattamie.

Now, look at it from a different angle:

Blouin and Culver were running pretty much neck and neck in the polls prior to election day. If you ran the absentee ballots and they were mostly for Blouin, it is doubtful anyone would consider that unusual. If they were mostly for Culver, no one's inner alarm would go off.

The only reason this error was noticed was because it was so out of the norm -- so different than what was expected based on the pre-election polls and what the local people knew to be the case. It could very well be that such "programming errors" existing in many other machines, but were not caught because there was not a stand-out, blown-away race on the ballot.

It is important that we not only have verifiable paper trails, but that we also take advantage of them by having robust random audits.

On Edit:

After going through all of that, I think I understand what you were really asking: Why were the absentee ballot totals off?

The machine was set up to read the two fill-in ovals in the order of:
Candidate A
Candidate B

My understanding is that there were two sets of absentee ballots. Some followed the order above, while others had the order reversed. Ironically, this was used as some sort of fraud protection, according to the county officials.

This was the way it was explained to me. To be completely honest, it bugs me. I don't want to say why yet because I need to verify somethings first.

It bugs me too. Glad to see that you want to verify things first.

If you can, as soon as possible, can the final numbers be posted? I'd like to look them over.

basic results, not broken down by precinct:
http://www.pottcounty.com/html/elections3.shtml

haven't been able to get the machine counts by precinct yet. It's on my to-do list for tomorrow.

Sciortino(sp) sure was popular... got more votes than the gov. race total. More than anybody else. No wonder the first numbers caused suspicion.