Outsourcing Elections

Southern Beale
Mad as Y'all, Not taking it anymore

Sunday, January 6, 2008

I’ve made no bones about how I feel about electronic touch-screen voting. I don’t trust it, I don’t want it, and I don’t understand why we have to have it.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has an excellent, albeit alarming. article about the problems with touch screen voting. It’s long, but it’s a thorough and comprehensive overview of the issue.

SNIP...Why are we ceding control of our elections to the companies that make the voting machines? This is no small thing. People have died for the right to vote in this country. And we’re just giving it away to some corporation? Why?

One of my conservative readers, responding to an earlier post on this issue, observed, “I'd just as soon everybody mark their choices on serialized paper ballots and count them by hand, even if we have to wait a week to find out who won.” I actually agree. I don’t think it will take that long, but I’d rather it be late, and accurate vs. fast and wrong. It’s just too important.


http://sobeale.blogspot.com/2008/01/outsourcing-elections.html

I have an Election complaint filed with the state of CT over our Town's November election. We had 3 re-canvases(started because two town council candidates were within 20 votes of each other)....so now we have 4 different counts....paper ballot scanned and 3 hand recounts. The totals are widely diverse. We've never been told how many people 'signed in'...or what the final tabulating machine # was. We've never been told accurate 'spoiled' ballot counts....or an accurate absentee ballot count. and we only have less than 3700 ballots in this small town.
As we watched the 3 manual counts there were MANY problems....most agregious was that the manual tabulating was done in a side room...out of our view. The 3rd/last recount was for 117 votes that were found 8 days after the election.....said to be mislabled as absentee but "were not".
After counting the 117 at 5:30...the vote counters went into a side room and came out and announced numbers.....one of the folks who'd scrambled to watch this late recount was one of the TC candidates. She'd heard her name called 41 times. After 20 minutes in the side room they came out and announced the counts....saying she'd gotten 22 votes. She challenged that with her hand made spreadsheet. The counters went back into the side room for another 20 minutes.....came out with adjusted numbers for every single candidate and announced 'oh, yes'....she'd had 41. All the other candidates numbers were adjusted to give her the rightful 41.
How many times does this type of events occur in communities across the nation and is not caught.
If we didn't have the 20 count margin trigger the recount....this vote manipulation would have been totally buried forever. The state has confiscated everything, ballots/memory card and they plan (I hope) for THEIR staff to count them. As I sat and observed the 2nd recount....there were a h u g e number of the ballots where they read only T W O names for the 5 vote Town Council selection.....there was an extremely high number of ballots where apparently only 2 names had their bubble filled in......and they were all together in the stacks. Do you think a great number of people went to the polls...voted only 2 names and nothing else on the ballot? I believe there was extra ballot stacking done for 2 specific people.

As I write this...I realize I have to call the State's staff attorney that's assigned to this complaint, tomorrow. When I questioned her about those 2 candidate ballots..rather than the 5 that should have been filled in......I didn't think about how they were all together....read by the vote counters. That's what drew my attention.....hearing the 2 names over and over again, at the 1 table out of 5--the one right in front of us observers....without more candidates being read off the ballot. Only 2 names were on MANY of the ballots...and were in one massive bunch within the stacks of ballots---all together. Those 2 became the top vote-getters. Now I'm convinced someone stacked the ballot box.