You may have already heard at least some of the bizarre story about three “Tea Party” supporters of Mississippi’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate Chris McDaniel who found themselves locked inside the Hinds County Courthouse around 2am on primary election night last Tuesday. McDaniel himself is now locked in a run-off for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate against six-term Senator Thad Cochran, after the nail-biter on Tuesday which left the two men reportedly about 1,400 votes apart out of more than 300,000 cast.
Ultimately, neither candidate received more than 50% of the vote, so they’ll face each other again in a run-off for the GOP nomination on June 24. But the incident that left the three McDaniel supporters calling for help to let them out of the courthouse in the middle of the night after the last election official had locked the door and left almost three hours earlier is more than curious. It has many wondering what the hell the three were doing at the location where ballots are tallied and vote tabulators stored, in one of the last counties to come in with their results on the squeaker of an election night.
The details of the story, and why the three — one a top campaign official for McDaniel (and a former Presidential campaign staffer for Newt Gingrich) — were there at all, remain murky. On Wednesday, the Hinds County Sheriff’s office said that there were “conflicting stories from the three of them.” But by Thursday evening, despite what a Sheriff’s spokesman described as a “fabrication” from the President of the Central Mississippi Tea Party who contacted a fellow Hinds County Republican executive committee member to seek his help in getting out of the courthouse, the county decided that she and the two men caught in the courthouse caper along with her broke no laws.
“Based on our findings and subsequent conclusion,” the County Sheriff’s office announced in a statement, “there is no reason to believe that the three individuals engaged in any criminal activity nor do we believe any laws were broken.”
But with one of the original headlines about the story focused on the fact that the three had been locked in the empty courthouse “with ballots on Election Night,” there remain a number of questions about what actually happened, despite initial reportage indicating that “ballots had been secured prior to the intrusion” and a subsequent report noting that “some precinct information wasn’t sealed.”
So, The BRAD BLOG contacted the Hinds County Election Commissioners to get more information on the exact type of voting system used there, which aspects of it might have been vulnerable to the three McDaniel supporters alone inside the courthouse, and what type of information was left unsealed there on election night.
We received detail answers to our questions from one of the five Hinds County Election Commissioners — the one who would, perhaps, have the most reason to be suspicious of the trio of McDaniel supporters…
Election Commissioner Connie Cochran, sister-in-law to McDaniel’s opponent, incumbent Senator Cochran, explained that last year, Hinds County replaced its old, 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting system (the AVS WINVote) with a precinct-based, optical-scanned paper-ballot system (the notoriously–defective ES&S DS200).
Like touch-screen voting systems, precinct-based optical-scan systems generally use a memory card that tallies votes on the computer scanner system at each precinct, before those memory cards are then transported back to election headquarters and fed into a central tabulator computer at the end of the night to total up all the votes from all of the different precincts.
Cochran confirmed that that’s essentially how the system works in Hinds, and that the paper ballots cast on election day, along with the vulnerable memory cards (which she calls “media sticks”), were stored away securely before she locked up the building when everyone left at 11:30pm Tuesday night.
“All media sticks used with the scanners, along with all ballots cast on election day were sealed in the Circuit Clerk’s office or vault,” she explained.
In Hinds, she said, “most of the absentee ballots were tallied at the precincts, some were not.” There were also a number of provisional ballots cast — they call them “affidavit ballots” in MS — that, she said, were still being processed as of Thursday afternoon. “There are probably 200-250 affidavit ballots to be verified,” she said at the time.
Cochran explained that there were approximately 725 paper absentee ballots received by the Circuit Clerk’s office, but that “most of them should have been tallied and added into the vote totals Tuesday night” — well before the three Cochran supporters were discovered to have entered and then found themselves locked in the building.
“All absentees and affidavit ballots were secured in the Circuit Clerk’s office before we left Tuesday night,” she says.
Cochran’s account largely matches the one from Hinds County Circuit Clerk Barbara Dunn, as reported by the Clarion-Ledger on Thursday evening.
“It would be very hard for anyone to get into my vault,” Dunn told the paper. “And I have an alarm system that is turned on that would make a loud sound if anyone opens the vault.”
Cochran also confirmed the earlier report that some materials from election night were, indeed, left unsealed at the end of the night. “The supply bags were left in the hall of the courthouse,” she said, later adding that they would have contained “Pens, pads, signage, blank ballots, extra affidavit envelopes, etc.”
Blank ballots? Could those have been used by the three McDaniel supporters to replace absentee or provisional/affidavit ballots that had not yet been scanned by the end of election night?
“There is a ballot accounting form that is to be filled out by a person from each polling location. It has a slot for them to put the number of unused ballots. So, there are checks and balances for the ballots. The supply bags were not examined Tuesday night. But there is a record of how many were unused,” Cochran told us via email late on Thursday.
We haven’t yet heard back as to whether the Commission had confirmed that the number of blank ballots listed in the record of each precinct bag matched the number of blank ballots in those bags after the strange incident came to light on Wednesday.
So, with the voted ballots and memory sticks stored securely inside the Circuit Clerk’s office and/or office vault, what about the central tabulator computer itself? Indeed, access to that computer is the simplest way to manipulate the results of an election — one which uses either touch-screen voting or optically-scanned paper ballots — in seconds.
Commissioner Cochran told The BRAD BLOG that the central tabulation computer “was returned to our office upon completion of results being entered and locked in our office (the Election Commission office)” on Tuesday night.
She added, after we’d specifically asked, that the central tabulation computer is not hooked into the courthouse computer network and/or the Internet “at this time.”
While the race was extremely close statewide, McDaniel lost fairly handily to Cochran in Hinds County, 65.7% to 33.8% or 10,928 votes to 5,621. With just 1,500 votes separating the two candidates statewide, however, it wouldn’t take many votes in a Cochran stronghold to put him over the 50% plus 1 threshold to avoid a run-off. Similarly, a few votes shaved off of Cochran’s totals in the same county might have been enough to send McDaniel to the November contest without a run-off in June, and few might have noticed had Cochran won handily in Hinds by 4,000 instead of 5,000.
As of 11:16pm on Election Night, McDaniel’s top staffer, Scott Brewster, made it clear that he understood the importance of the results in Hinds. “Going to come down to Hinds county,” he posted to Facebook at the time. “We will win the night but might be runoff.”
Brewster was among the three who had to be let out of the Hinds County Courthouse by a Sheriff Dept. officer at 3:45am on Wednesday. He was also reportedly among the first to have learned about the other bizarre incident in the bitter Cochran-McDaniel battle, the one involving a blogger who had broken into a nursing home to take photographs of Cochran’s infirm wife before posting them online in an Internet hit video. The blogger and three other McDaniel supporters — including both a member of the Central Mississippi Tea Party and McDaniel’s former radio co-host — were arrested on conspiracy charges in connection with that break-in. The McDaniel campaign has denied any involvement in the affair, and the incident didn’t seem to hurt him, at least according to Tuesday’s reported results.
The McDaniel campaign might, arguably, have had a motive to manipulate ballots or election results on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, but — presuming the county election officials are correct in their assessments — without direct access to the ballots themselves, the optical-scan tabulator memory cards or the central tabulator computer system, the hapless “Tea Party” trio would seemingly have had neither the means nor opportunity to do so.
What they were doing in the Hinds County Courthouse then — all alone in the middle of the night after the primary election — remains a Mississippi mystery.
It’s TOTALLY non suspicious for them to remain trapped in that building for hours since it’s widely known that both the telephone and cell phone service in Jackson Mississippi are switched off at night due to budgetary limitations. Top it off with the fact that the majority of the police force were either at the end of McDowell at the Waffle House, or running Gestapo check points up and down Terry Road. Is it any wonder they took so long to get assistance? Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t have to ascend to the roof, wait for daylight and send smoke signals. They could have used the stolen ballots to build a nice blaze and even if the fire department put out the blaze and the burnt ends of the ballots were clearly visible in the debris, the sheriff wouldn’t be able to connect the dots anyway. Makes total sense to a creation scientist. #creationscience #brooksbrothersbreakin Enjoy.
Brad: I’m curious about three points.
1. In Hinds County, are the absentee ballots (affidavits) hand-counted or simply tallied by the op scans?
2. What are chain-of-custody procedures in MS?
3. Does MS have a provision for candidates to request a hand count of the paper ballots?
where are the results posted?
i went to the county site, it only has past results
i went to state web site, it only had past results
if you have a link i would like to see it
“Are you the three election officials we were waiting for?” Curly answers, “No, we’re…” (Moe stomps on Curly’s foot) “Why, yes we are,” says Moe.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/fi...CTION=POLITICS
only results i can find
the difference is 1386 according to this web site
since there are 1832 precincts state wide this race could of been flipped with less than 1 changed ballot per precinct
another thing
if you add the dem us house votes up for hind county from district 3 &2, 14,681 dems voted while in the senate race only 13,834 dems voted
so at least 847 undervotes in senate dem race
KarenFromIllinois –
Yes. Incredibly, I was unable to find an official source of results in MS as well. Only the AP reported numbers, which I cross-checked w/ several diff media sources. (They matched, but, again, weren’t official sources, and could have all come via the same AP collection.)
As to your suggestion about undervotes in the Senate Dem primary, I’d have to see exactly what you were talking about, but I’m fairly sure there was quite a bit of crossover voting, as Dems voted for one or another candidate in the GOP Senate race. MS has an open primary system, as I understand it. So voters could chose which party’s primary they wanted to vote in. Don’t know if that’s related to your calculations or not.
Jim Spriggs @ 3 FTW!!! 🙂
Hinds County again?
So Hinds County is Tennessee’s version of Broward Co Florida.
Keep up the great work on shining light on this, that is the first essential step before there will be change.
Folks in Hinds County will have to work around the system until it is cleaned up.
Posting corrected comment (couldn’t find edit buttonn)
Hinds County again?
So Hinds County is
Tennessee’sMississippi’s version of Broward Co Florida.Keep up the great work on shining light on this, that is the first essential step before there will be change.
Folks in Hinds County will have to work around the system until it is cleaned up
They turn off cell service at night to save money?? How the heck much money could that possibly save? I think that excuse is TOTAL BS. That should be able to be confirmed by contacting the cell phone provider. Or a FOIA request to the
county controller for a copy of the bills from the cell service provider.
I’m sure if each of the participants were sequestered separately, we would get different stories from each of them. But the more time that goes by, the more time they have to confer with each other!
This stinks to high heaven. Go get ’em Brad!
Could they have been cleaning up hacked memory cards? They locked up the memory cards, but did they lock all of them, including the ones that were not used? Because the unused ones might have been overlooked, presumed to be blank, but really needing to be cleaned up to keep people from going to jail.
brad,
ty for the info on the open primary, much easier to rig numbers if we can not even tell
how many dem votes and how many rep votes
as you know i detest the lack of transparency…way too easy for the ptb to determine the “official result” when they actually have reported NOTHING to date
as you know in the sos race in virginia thousands of votes were found or deleted during the days after the election….which we would never of known if the county and/or state had not reported the first results…ms has figured out how to keep us from seeing the numbers spin…show us NOTHING
TY AS ALWAYS FOR GOOD REPORTING
See “Hacking Democracy” and the Harri Hursti attack demo done in Leon County Florida, where Ion Sancho permitted the demonstration to be done–a mock election. There was nothing unusual to be found on the hacked memory card after the “votes” had been counted. However, if Hursti had handed them two cards and they had looked at the unused one, they would have found a “smoking gun” file with code and negative and positive skew counts to be used in preloading and skewing the results.
By the way–I work with computers. It is so totally bogus to have a machine that counts votes using numbers that can be either negative or positive. Ordinarily, so if this was a machine to count widgits in a factory, it would use a variable type that is incapable of representing negative numbers, since negative numbers have no business in counting ANYTHING, unless the machine is designed on purpose so as to allow or even promote stealing elections.
Well, as you’ve always said, Brad, with no chain of custody, how can anyone know what’s going on in any election. We voters seem to be relying on the honesty and integrity of people that appear to have very little.
Want to hear the stories they come up with. So far, if I’m understanding this correctly, the sheriff said that their story of how they got in is untrue. Okay, that’s a start.
Next–Whether everything(that was important to the security of the votes)was secured or not, what’s their story for what they were doing in there for what, two and a half-three hours? Were they supposed to have been doing nothing in there for hours before they decided to phone somebody to let them out?
Also, on Chris Hayes last night he had a little clip of the woman in the group talking about how it was a big mistake giving women the right to vote. I’m guessing she’s gonna have an interesting version of events.
Ah, my old hometown… Grew up in Jackson, did a congressional campaign. Mom, sis, cousins, aunts, uncles and bro still there. Would be nice if somebody could get to the bottom of this. Not a partisan question, as far as I can see…
David Lasagna @16 asks:
Brad’s article merely states that the three McDaniel supporters did not call to be let out until three hours after the last election official left, and locked up.
We do not know (a) when they actually first entered the courthouse, (b) how, if they entered before the last election official left, their presence went undetected by that election official, (c) why they delayed three hours after being locked inside before calling for help to be let out?
Fucking amazing, things we have been seeing and showing are going on for years now and MSM does not even care to give the general public an awareness of…just whose’s air waves are they again?
Pirates for the right reason…ALL PEOPLE ARE EQUAL IN THE CREATOR’S EYES.
so from the state web site
///////////
Process for Certifying Election Results in a Party Primary:
All primary elections in the State of Mississippi are run by the respective state parties. State law requires the transmittal of certified election results to the State Party Executive Committees of the Democratic and Republican Parties. The State Party Executive Committees compile the certified results from each county and certify their election results. The Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office does not certify the results of a Primary Election. The certification is performed by the State Party Executive Committees. The State Executive Committees have ten (10) days from the date of the election (June 13, 2014) to submit certified results to the Secretary of State’s Office. The Secretary of State’s Office accepts the certified results by the State Executive Committees on behalf of the State of Mississippi. (Miss. Code Ann §23-15-599)
Post Election Deadlines:
June 10, 2014: Deadline for voters who did not present acceptable photo identification for the 2014 Primary Election, who had to cast an affidavit ballot, to submit acceptable photo identification to the Circuit Clerk’s Office for their ballot to be counted. (MS Const. §249-A-(2)(c))
June 13, 2014: Deadline for the State Party Executive Committees to submit certified results to the Secretary of State’s Office. (Miss. Code Ann §23-15-599)
Post Election Notes:
The Secretary of State’s Office does not have the number of affidavit ballots cast or certified election results in the 2014 Primary Election. To ascertain the number of affidavit ballots cast in the election, please contact each county.
State law requires the counting of absentee ballots to be conducted at the precinct on the night of the election. Absentee ballots should not be counted after the day of the election. Only affidavit ballots should be counted after the election. (Miss. Code Ann §23-15-639)
If there is a Primary Runoff Election:
The 2014 Primary Runoff Election will be held on June 24, 2014 (Miss. Code Ann §23-15-305)
Polls are open from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm.
Citizens must have been registered for the June 3, 2014 Primary Election to be eligible to vote in the June 24, 2014 Primary Runoff Election.
If an eligible voter did not participate in the June 3rd Primary Election, the voter may vote in either the Democratic or Republican Primary Runoff.
The State of Mississippi does not allow “crossover” voting. Meaning, if a voter cast a ballot in the Democratic Primary, he/she must cast a ballot in the Democratic Primary Runoff. If a voter cast a ballot in the Republican Primary, he/she must cast a ballot in the Republican Primary Runoff. (Miss. Code Ann §23-15-575)
Uniformed and Overseas ballots have been transmitted in accordance with State and Federal law.
http://www.sos.ms.gov/news_pres...se.aspx?id=584
according to that folks do need to chose either a dem ballot or a rep ballot
so that large undervote stands in the dem senate race
incredible that no official numbers are posted yet in this election…according to the state the county has the responsibility to certify and then the PARTY collects it…so that tea party guy has zero chance
and to the voters ,evidently it is none of your business