Blogged on the fly by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org
The Associated Press is reporting that the two Sequoia AVC Advantage touch-screen voting machines at the Hoboken Fire Department Engine Company No. 2 on Washington Street would not work for about 45 minutes as the polls opened this morning. This polling place just happens to be the location where New Jersey Governor John Corzine votes, or was at least scheduled to at 6:15am. He was unable to cast his vote until 7:00am according to the reports.
AP notes that several voters were turned away this morning until they were able to get one of the machines working. Fox “News” reported earlier that there were no provisional ballots at the poll site, so voters had no choice but to wait for the machines to be fixed or to choose not to vote at all.
Update by Brad Friedman flying in…
New York’s ABC 7 confirms the problems. They report: “The big question is why did this polling place not have any provisional ballots,” and they note that “lots of people were obviously turned away.”
Corzine is just the latest in a growing line of public officials and other well-known personalities who have run into recent trouble voting at the polls.
- Last week, Rush Limbaugh’s touch-screen machine froze up while voting in the Florida Primary.
- In 2006, Missouri’s Sec. of State Robin Carnahan was told three times by a pollworker, in violation of state law, that she would have to produce a drivers license before she would be allowed to vote.
- In 2005, California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was temporarily barred from casting his vote, as the e-voting system in Santa Monica showed him as having already voted.
- And, only somewhat related: In early 2006, Ann Coulter knowingly voted at the wrong precinct (a first degree misdemeanor) after knowingly using an incorrect home address, that of her realtor, on her voter registration form in Palm Beach County Florida (a third-degree felony).
FURTHER UPDATE FROM BRAD, 7:45am PT: Right on schedule, officials say pollworkers are to blame for the still-unspecified problem that kept machines from working this morning. As you’ll see, it’s always “human error”, rather than the fault of the crappy machines, or the idiots who created them so poorly or made them so complicated that they continue to fail in election after election. The only “human error”, in truth, is that of the Election Officials who irresponsibly chose to use these horrible voting systems in the first place.
STILL FURTHER UPDATE FROM BRAD, 12:15pm PT: One of the “conspiracy theorists” at Daily Kos reports that attempts to vote for Obama flipped to Clinton on the touch-screen voting systems. Further such reports also found in comments there.
NPR had a horrid piece yesterday on All Things Considered, speaking with some election honcho in Riverside, California. It was so pro-electronic as to make one sick – not mentioning these machines’ various failures at all, only going on and on about how long it will take to count the votes and how damned convenient the electronic machines supposedly are.
The Riverside County Registrar, Barbara Dunmore, and a number of other registrars across the state have been on a disinfo campaign rampage in retaliation against CA SoS Debra Bowen because she’s required that they use (and hopefully count) paper ballots.
I had a thing or two to say about it a few days ago here.
I just voted in Leonardo, NJ. For the first time, I used a paperless, push button machine, which felt completely insecure.
Two things happened:
1. The election volunteer asked me if I was a Republican or a Democrat, and filled in a little box with my answer. That never happened before.
2. The signature on file in the book was NOT MY SIGNATURE! It was a terrible attempt to imitate my signature. This also has never happened before. I took a cellphone picture of it. Where do I go to ask how this happened?
I feel like my vote went right into the ethersphere.
I had the same problem as Governor Corzine. The poll workers couldn’t figure out how to get the machines to work (you’d think they would test them before the polls open).
I got there about 6:15am and it took them about 15 minutes to get them working. There was only one other person waiting. No one mentioned provisional ballots, so I don’t know if there were any.
There’s a NJ ballot story at Dkos (read it before it disappears):
Trying to Vote for Obama, Machine Resets to Clinton in NJ
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2...065/255/450294
I read the NJ ballot story. The comments were depressing. Quite a few working on the disinfo today. My bad. Shouldn’t have gone there.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/P...uper_0205.html
– Tom
Sure enough — I was first at my polling place (in Westchester County, NT), and the poll workers couldn’t figure out how to activate the manual voting machine. These were the same old-timers who staff the polls year after year. I watched them apparently struggle to figure out the sign-in paper work, and then not be able to guide the key into the mechanism to unlock the manual machine. Someone who appeared to be an election coordinator eventually came along, took the key from the man, and turned it in the lock.
No disaster, but it seemed to illustrate something about the whole borderline inept election system. I wonder what happens to my vote at the end of the evening?
Another important vote to consider today is the vote to grant immunity to the telecoms for invading the people.
They helped preznit blush invade us in our homes by giving him and Karl Rove our phone and payment records so “they could purtek us frum turrists”.
The Senate better not let those lying fascists off the hook or we will get those senators in November.
Remember the purple fingers of the “free Iraqis” … JOKE!!! BIG BROTHER is a republican.
Upthread..Hated I went over to the dark side.Read the Kos diary and comments about voting for Obama and Hillary’s name pops up. Lots of comments saying Hillary is not fixing the election. Methinks they protest too much. One comment…Don’t pay attention to this diary..Seems someone had to check up on previous diaries and comments by the one who dared say their vote was flipped. The Kosers were warned writer was untrustworthy.Cannot understand how intelligent people can’t see through the KGB tactics.
#9 DREDD.
CSPAN 2 I just heard Feinstein and Dodd will be going over FISA telco immunity tomorrow morning. (Could be the thing to watch, if folks get burned out on the fascist media coverage of Super Tuesday)
I also don’t see any reason why folks should slam their senators phones and emails yet again until they have decided this one way or the other.
A message could be as simple as ” No Immunity for Telcos in the Fisa Bill ”
Or much more colorful and in depth…
Another CREATIVE EMAIL campaign, could be to your local TV stations EMAIL contacts to tell them
this and this.
Go to each Stations “contact us” page, Hit each one of them with an email. Get active and start countering their propaganda!!
Or of course, you could just kick back and do nothing. Suck a beer or two down.
By the way that DNI warning about Al Queda planning stikes in the USA. Should be reverse engineered and if it’s bullshit that DNI dude( O Connel ) ought to be put in a fucking JAIL for fake terrorist alerts!
Ask yourself WHY TODAY?!
Molly: Thanks for the update on the darkos-side.
It strikes me that the problem is our insistence on anonymous voting. If each of our votes were accompanied by identification, it would perhaps be harder to divert them.