During yesterday’s Wisconsin primary election, a number of paper ballots were sent out in several counties that were reportedly too wide to be tabulated by the computerized optical-scan systems used to tally ballots in the state. The same exact thing happened just two weeks ago during the Illinois primary sending election officials into a panic and causing delays for some voters.
Then, as now, the problem has been chalked up to a paper-cutting error by the printers. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it’s not. We’ll take them at their word, barring evidence to the contrary. Innocent errors can and do happen.
But whether that’s an accurate explanation or not, one way in which the failure was dealt with in both Illinois and Wisconsin continues to be extremely troubling and, frankly, offense: the practice of election workers manually “remaking” the ballots of voters after the election, in ostensible secret, and before they are tabulated…
From AP’s report yesterday afternoon on what happened in Wisconsin [emphasis added]…
Workers in six Portage County municipalities had to copy some absentee votes onto new ballots, too, after a printing company put the wrong computer codes on ballots. Workers caught and fixed the problem before the election but not before some absentee ballots went out.
It has become standard practice across the country for election workers to actually create new ballots, by hand, out of ballots that cannot be read by optical-scan tallying computers. The workers either “remake” those ballots correctly or incorrectly. Who knows?
In some cases over the years, in places where touch-screen voting machines are used, but have broken down during the day — or in cases were voters preferred to use paper ballots, if allowed — votes cast on paper ballots are later actually punched into touch-screen e-voting systems by election workers. Again, the workers either carry out that sensitive, fraught-with-error operation either correctly or incorrectly. Who knows?
All of that, instead of simply counting such ballots — or, all of them, frankly — publicly, by hand, as per “Democracy’s Gold Standard”, as the bi-partisan election officials in Columbia County, NY now do, or as they were forced to do over the weekend in Palm Beach, FL after the optical-scan computers (the same ones used across almost all of Wisconsin, by the way), actually declared the wrong “winners” in several different races.
Was the ballot you cast when you last voted “remade” in secret by someone else after you cast it? If so, was it done accurately?
As long as this appalling practice continues, you’ll likely never know.
outrageous – important reporting here.
Thought you might like to know the latest crap from waukesha – bradblog readers will likely remember the choke-holdin’ “The Chief Justice is a ‘Total Bitch!'” and the woman that helped him steal that critical 2010 race, Kathy Nickolaus, Wisconsin County Clerk, Admits Another Vote Counting Mistake
It is amazing how much trust the good people of this country have in election officials and election workers. It is also very, very scary.
Whenever I think of voting I think of the vote recount in Florida when the people were trying to recount and the thugs standing at the window shaking their fist at the workers. The esteemed SCOTUS settled that one. It has been nothing but crooked since. Thanks to people like Brad to keep this farce before the people. Some day we the people will wake up and wonder what happened to our right to vote. Keep up the good work Brad and maybe more people will wise up.
@Newman: There’s a fair amount of evidence that one of those “thugs” at the window in what became known as The Brooks Brothers Riots is now the sitting Chief Justice of the SCOTUS.
Just sayin’. It’s actually WORSE than you think.
Damn “humidity” strikes again!
@#1 – Madison voices. If I read the Waukesha article correctly, the “problem” reported is actually a GOOD THING. Instead of adding up the local results on her personal computer and announcing the “results” 3 days later, as last time, Nicholaus tacked the local result tapes on the wall and let observers add them up. That eliminates the easiest form of election fraud, manipulating the central tabulator. The local machines could still be miscounting (by error or hack) or have false ballots inserted (under guise of “wrong size” problems) but the totals are not being manipulated. This is actually progress in bizarro-vote America.
uhmm, but they copied all the ballots by hand, Randy. How do you know they copied them correctly? Theoretically they should now have 2 sets of ballots, and they should match. My guess is that they don’t, however, for some reason or another. And we won’t be able to count them by hand, or only the copied ones will be available, the original ballots were eaten by a big alligator or something.
(I heard alligators like cold weather, cheese, and ballots)
When are the American voters and citizens going to demand that this BS stops.
This is one good reason why republicans are so arrogant and deceitful to say whatever they wish.
They know that these elections are already fixed.