Recounting the Recount and Counting the Uncounted

Recounting the Recount and Counting the Uncounted
HBO's Retelling of the 2000 Florida Election Debacle on Sunday Raises Interesting Questions about 2008 Certain to be Ignored as Quickly as Possible by the American Corporate Mainstream Media...

"The recount never really happened," notes Kevin Spacey, correctly, about the 2000 Florida election debacle in his interview Wednesday night on Countdown, in advance of Recount, HBO's theatrical retelling of the nightmare. The film premieres this Sunday.

But for the third in our countdown of productions with the word "count" in its title, we turn to our friend Mary Mancini, who smartly blogs at the website of the documentary film Uncounted (we're in it, so see FULL DISCLOSURE at end of this article), pointing out that Olbermann, during his interview with Spacey (video, including clip from film at link below), joined so many other journalists who have taken the opportunity of the premiere of HBO's film to miss more than a few good journalistic opportunities...

FULL STORY: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6011

that suggested that you can "recount" by just running the paper thru the optiscans again. His answer seemed to say that you could get a different result on the recount than you got on the original vote tally.

This seems ridiculous to me. If the recount doesn't agree with the original tally, then something is mechanically wrong with the machine or the programming has changed. It's possible that the ballot definition might not be precise enough so you could get some minor differences because of the way paper feeds into the machine, but other than that I don't understand Spacey's comment.

The only way to "recount" a machine is by a transparent hand count with observers.

I also think the optiscans have been responsible for more fraudulent vote counting than the touchscreens and are more dangerous as well. They are not the answer unless there's a tough audit used that counts the paper and doesn't just run the paper thru the machine again.

Spacey needs to be straightened out about this before he confuses people even more than they're already confused by all the lies and misrepresentations of the vendors and bought-off elections officials.

...If you look at the clip from the film that's included in the Spacey interview (at the link above) you'll see that they show a close up of a punchcard ballot going back through a counter, and have it's chad pushed back into blocking position by the rollers.

So yeah, could have different totals each time you run that kind of ballot through the punch card tabulator, just the same way you could have different totals each time you put an op-scan ballot through the op-scan reader. We've seen the same ballots read differently depending on which op-scan system they are put through, and we've even seen the same op-scan reader read the same ballot differently the second time through!

Of course, we could just count the damn things by hand. In front of everybody. At the precinct before the ballots move anywhere. But that might make too much sense, and disallow a bunch of corporations from getting their billions of dollars in free money from us. So I guess that's right out.

in addition to the recount. For example, was voter purging and voter caging the only reason a recount was needed? There is a long list of issue to examine, in addition to the recount.