Evoting Problems in Ohio

deus_X_machina writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that a computer error involving one voting-machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, says the cartridge was retested yesterday and there were no problems. He couldn't explain why the computer reader malfunctioned."

Comments

Let The Games Begin

[wcb4]

I'msure this is only the first of many, many such stories we wil hear.... No paper audit trail in many places. fun fun fun

Re:Let The Games Begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another one.

"Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had pressed the Kerry button on their electronic voting screen, only to have Bush light up as the candidate they had chosen. In some cases, this would happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed Kerry and eventually his name would light up. In other cases, the voters pushed Kerry but were later asked to confirm their Bush vote."

Re:This only gets interesting

[BlueCup]

The interesting thing is that if just a few, say 20, votes were changed on every machine, it'd be enough to make a huge difference, and no one would be the wiser.

Re:How was the correct count derived?

[ugmoe]

Yesterday, they rechecked the removable cartridge and got 115 Bush votes.

Yesterday, they checked the non-removable memory banks in the voting machine and to 115 Bush votes.

Since the non-removable memory banks matched the removable cardridge, they used that as the offical Bush vote from the machine.

The other 2 machines had a total of 250 Bush votes.

Adding 250 to 115 gives 365 Bush votes total for the precinct.

Vote count problem in San Francisco (Not Diebold)

[ugmoe]

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041105/D865R1DO0 .html

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

The faulty machines were not Diebold

[ugmoe]

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041105/D865SVN80 .html Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.

Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls Inc.'s ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touchscreen voting system. Danaher did not immediately return a message for comment.

Mainstream media?

[metroid composite]

Okay, turned on the news wondering what kind of spin CNN would have on this. Didn't come up. So I started doing searches....

CNN
Foxnews
BBC
CBC
Aljzeera's search engine is not working properly today; oh well.
Ohio News Now

Anyone care to tell me why this simply isn't being reported at all? I've never heard of the Columbus Dispatch. Nor have I heard of the Washington Dispatch (one other place I've seen run the story).

Is it too new to be picked up?
Is it not considered newsworthy as just correcting a routine error?
Is it being censored? And if so then why by every news company including those outside of US juristiction?

Forgive me for being a bit skeptical on this story, but I do tend to assume that vote talliers can spot an order of magnitude error.

Re:Mainstream media?

[deus_X_machina]

You mean the same CNN who is reporting this?

Or perhaps the San Fransisco gate reporting it.

Maybe Yahoo New's report?

C'mon man, turn on the TV... normally I'd say just because it's not in the mainstream media doesn't mean it's not true. But this time it is...

Re:hmm

[Danse]

They were probably balanced out by the criminal and borderline criminal acts the Democrats engaged in prior to the election.

Umm, actually no, they weren't. Read about it here. You may want to skip about 2/3s of the way down the page to this part:

This is the way these stories go. Both sides make charges that seem roughly the same. But on this issue, there is a qualitative difference between Democrats and Republicans. I called both camps and asked them to give me their worst stuff about the other side. Here's what the Republican spokesman, Scott Hogenson, said.

[Scott] We have been compiling hundreds of pages of media reports from all over the country of documented cases of investigations of fraudulent voter registration cases. Everything from police in Ohio investigating a pro-Kerry effort to submit faulty voter registration forms, then pay the people with crack cocaine, to a gentleman in Denver, CO, who brags and laughs on television about having registered to vote 35 times, that it's just the... the number and degree of faulty and questionable and outright fraudulent registrations is really quite stunning in its depth and breadth.

[Reporter voiceover resumes] He sent me a copy. It's all newspaper clips, many of them unverified charges. There are a few that check out. There really was, for example, this white guy working for an outfit affiliated with the NAACP, who registered voters under names like Mary Poppins and Jeffrey Dahmer, and it's true, he was paid in crack cocaine. Very bad... and a great story. And then there was the Colorado guy who registered himself 35 times. Also true. Also very bad. But the reason you're going to be hearing about these two examples over and over in the offical Republican talking points in the next few days is that that's the best they've got in their hundreds of pages.

This sums it up though:

"So, are they all the same? Is the crackhead faking a handful of registrations for Jeffrey Dahmer the same kind of thing as wiping 17,000 voters in Nevada, 23,000 voters in Florida, 30,000 voters in Ohio completely off the rolls?"