Orlando Sentinel’s coverage on Friday began with these incredible words [emphasis ours]:
“Not as foolproof as hoped”?!
Just who exactly are the fools they’re referring to there?
Electronic voting machines made by ES&S, the largest supplier of voting systems in the country, failed across the country on Election Day. We’re beginning to see more and more of the results of the failures from those machines — as “foolproof,” apparently, as the Titanic was “unsinkable.”
An unprecedented 83% voter turnout has been reported from ES&S iVotronic paperless touch-screen systems in Benton County, Arkansas, after the Election Commission reviewed it’s balloting when it was found that tabulated votes were being dropped from the system as new votes were being entered into it on Tuesday night.
The results: More votes than citizens in several areas of Benton County and an overall turnout described as “eye-popping” by a University of Arkansas political science professor who pointed to Idaho’s 63% turnout as having made news for a midterm election record. Idaho’s got nothing on Benton County, apparently.
Four different Florida counties are reporting enormous undervote rates on the same type of ES&S iVotronic paperless touch-screen systems in at least one key U.S. House race and in their election for State Attorney General.
And in one small town, ES&S voting machines are reporting zero votes for a mayoral candidate who swears that, yes, he really did vote for himself!
In Arkansas, the Morning News reported on Friday…
After the Election Commission reviewed the votes Wednesday, the turnout jumped from 49 percent to 83 percent.
…
Election Systems & Software has a statewide contract to provide voting machines.
…
A close analysis of Thursday’s results show in two races, more people voted in a mayoral race than live in the town, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s July 2005 estimates. In Gateway, a town of 122 people, 199 votes were cast in an uncontested mayoral race. In the Pea Ridge, 3,997 votes were cast in a contested mayor’s race for the city of 3,344 people.
…
The retabulated results changed the outcome of eight contests, mostly in tight races or races with few votes cast.
The revised Thursday report said 79,331 of 95,900 registered voters, or 83 percent, cast ballots. The original results released on election night said 47,134 voters, or 49 percent, cast ballots.
Perhaps all of those extra votes were shipped up from Florida where the same type of ES&S iVotronic paperless touch-screen machines seem to have completely lost more than 18,000 votes in their 13th Congressional District U.S. House race. That contest, ironically enough, is to fill the seat of former FL Secretary of State and underminer of democracy, Katherine Harris.
Currently, the Republican Vern Buchanan leads the Democratic candidate, Christine Jennings in the FL-13 race by just 373 votes.
The same type of paperless touch-screen machines are also reporting undervote rates of about 20% in three different Florida counties — totalling some 45,000 votes — in the state Attorney General race where the Republican Bill McCollum is said to have defeated the Democratic candidate Walter “Skip” Campbell…according to the “foolproof” machine reports anyway.
Perhaps voters thought the candidate’s nickname “Skip” was an instruction when reading their electronic “ballot”. According to an analysis by the Miami Sentinel…
By comparison, undervotes in those same counties in the U.S. Senate race were no higher than 1.5 percent.
Not bad enough for you? (Oh, please make our day, New York Times and Associated Press and tell us again how well things went on Tuesday!) Back up in Arkansas, Randy Wooten, a mayoral candidate in the small town of Waldenburg in Poinsette County seems to have received ZERO votes in total.
Though the town has just 80 voters, it seems unlikely Wooten would have failed to have voted for himself at the very least. He says that he did. He’s deciding whether to get a court order to open the machines to try and check the totals. We hope he does. His town uses both ES&S optical-scan and touch-screen systems.
Back after the March 7th Republican primary election in Texas, The BRAD BLOG reported on another candidate who received zero votes on ES&S voting machines. Former state Supreme Court Justice Steve Smith, contested the election after he lost by 100% in Winkler County. He had won handily in that county previously, winning by 74% in 2002 and 65% in 2004. In the same election, ES&S and Hart Intercivic voting machines added a full 100,000 phantom votes to the tally in Tarrant County (Fort Worth), TX.
Of course, the ES&S failures were legion all across the country during this year’s primaries — in Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Texas and elsewhere. So this is one train wreck that at least BRAD BLOG readers certainly saw coming.
Other than that though, everything’s just fine.
OMG, Someone put an inverted Jenny stamp on their absentee ballot envelope
Link
Floridiot! How do you find this stuff? 🙂
Well it’s not just Florida in the limelight, this mess has gone nationwide (minus the Jenny) this time around.I have the feeling someone is going to be very surprised when they check their stamp collection!
These paperless electronic voting machines are junk. When will the election officials consult with election integrity experts instead of the sales and marketing departments of the companies that push their inferior product? How many years and how many more failed elections will it take?
Hey Nana!!! :waves:
Do you sometimes wonder how people suddenly got SO STUPID??? Oh wait – maybe there’s some corruption in there. 🙂
One bright thought to keep in mind — Ohio, Nevada and California (sorry I don’t know where else) all elected Dem Secs of State
who are very aware of the sick, sad joke that are the current crop of e-vote machine!! That is a huge number of electorates that will NOT be stolen in 2008!! Jennifer Brunner, Ross Miller and Debra Bowen!!
Anyone from other states have the results of your Sec of State races?
Don’t forget Mark Ritchie in MN, Jen. A staunch Election Integrity guy so far as I can tell (and I hear a BRAD BLOG reader to boot, but that may just be scurrilous rumor meant to destroy an otherwise excellent reputation). 😉
The media says this election went fine except for a few glitches.
It reminds ME of Dick Cheney’s “HIGHWAY OF DEATH” in the first Gulf War!
Don’t worry, the bugs should be worked out by 2018.
The only thing relevant about voting machines is whether they are faith based or whether they are science based.
That is, are they mathmatically verifiable like an ATM?
Whether there is fraud or not is irrelevant and a straw man argument.
It is more promising to point out whether they work and are secure or not, and point it out well. Otherwise one may become exposed to the plague of rancor.
Kira #2, I saw it while reading the paper yesterday morn
Front page news at the St Pete times don’t cha know 😉
And their voting stories usually suck
The only person who had the correct election numbers, according to guess who, was Karl Rove.
He might be open to the suggestion that since the numbers don’t agree with his, the voting machines do not work.
Add the scarlet letter “R” to Love, and you have “Rove” in a nutshell (where he dwells).
Rove suffers from a vision of himself that is beyond elite and into mystical. In plain terms that street folk use, he lives in his own fantasy world.
Not only that, he believes and has faith in the notion that if he believes it hard enough and long enough – if he stays the course – it will become true.
Psychologists know he is right – in his own mind it will become true – but to the rest of us watching the treatment of his psychosis, we observe the institutionalization of self-deceit in the government.
Thankfully reality has front stage for awhile. But Rove will not recover, and most sadly, neither will the neoCons he and his ilk deceived.
I was a computer systems engineer for 35 years, and I see no benefit whatsoever to running elections with touchscreen, computerized voting machines. Aside from the fact that the computer software is so prone to bugs and so easy to hack, it makes no sense economically. Why would one wish to equip each workstation with an expensive touchscreen terminal when paper ballots fed to a single scanner at each polling place would do the job faster? With the scanner approach, a polling place can be expanded easily and cheaply, if need be, by adding only tables. A scanner can process a ballot in milliseconds, while with the touchscreen terminal, the equipment sits practically idle while each voter takes his/her time to fill in the ballot. The only reason I can think of for the touchscreen machines would be that it provides a way to steer large sums of public money to the contractors who build and service the machines.