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Counting Glitches In Washington Governor Race
Fjornir writes "With 19 votes currently seperating the challenger from the incumbent in Washington state's race for governor, local news sites sites are reporting more glitches in the process for counting votes. This one, which has been described alternately as 'computer problems' and 'human error' as I've watched the story unfold, caused 6,200 ballots to be counted twice. This raises the question -- how many 'isolated incidents' are there going to be before we admit we have a 'real problem' on our hands?" Votes must be certified today, and a difference of less than 2,000 means an automatic statewide recount. If the difference is less than 150, that recount will be by hand (which is hard for the voting machines that have no paper trail). Update: 11/18 05:46 GMT by P : One candidate finished with a lead of 261, so the statewide recount will not be by hand, and should be completed before Thanksgiving.
The 93% voting turnout should have been the first red flag of the human error.
A 93% voter turn-out should be standard operating procedure. But, unfortunately in this country, it is a red flag.
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Don't forget, that the votes being thrown out can still be claimed.
But since people don't know their vote was thrown out there is no normal way of contacting them.
So, Republicans called only Republicans and Democrats went to each of the Democrats and got signatures. And of course, which nobody knows if its legal. But thats why you vote by mail, because you can't make it in person. Vacation, Business travel, or any other reason.
Also, I'm tired of all the problems with counting votes, bad enough we have machines that have *Glitches* and looses votes, or gives votes to the wrong person. It's not a fucking *Glitch* its a fucking failure! It's job is to count votes with 100% success. Thats like calling a lung machine that stops a *Glitch*...
No paper trail, too short of time to count votes, machines that don't work, processes that don't work, human error and fraud.
This is why everyone is pissed off, we know votes are being tampered with. Every time you do a recount, the vote count CHANGES!
I live in Washington and voted by touch screen. I have no proof where my vote was cast, and I must trust the machine?! No wonder people also turn in paper ballots.
In an age where powerful people are commiting fraud, why is it hard to believe that our votes are being corrupted?
Oh look, Ohio had some fraud, couldnt happen in our state. Pffft.
This could be a good thing. If enough "small" problems like this crop up, maybe that will help give some momentum to the idea that we need to audit the living hell out of the entire 2004 election. Not with an eye toward overturning Dubya's win or anything drastic like that, but with an eye toward finding and fixing any and all problems before the next run. I just don't see how that's anything other than common sense; we've done a fairly drastic overhaul of our electoral system over the past few years, so who could possibly say with a straight face that checking its accuracy after the fact is not absolutely essential?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I am a Washington State voter, and my whole county (Snohomish) uses the same type of voting machine. Other counties are different. But here you can watch the little ticker-tape coming out of the back of each machine. I don't know how the votes are encoded, but there is definitely a paper audit trail.
I'm actually concerned about the accuracy of the recount, since it is likely to be hand-counted (required by law when the difference is below some threshold -- I don't know the specifics.) Despite any bugs in the electronic systems that may or may not affect the count, hand-counting pretty much guarantees a certain margin of error.
Anyone ever tried to accurately count a stack of ten thousand pieces of paper, dividing them into two separate piles in the process? I screw up occassionally just separating puzzle pieces into separate groups of edge and center pieces -- for small (100 piece) jigsaw puzzles!
Don't be so sure that the ones going to the booths are "more intelligent". Lots of them are the kind of voters that are easily brainwashed by propaganda/talk show hosts/party line blabber. You know, the ones that would have voted Democrat/Republican even if "Yog-Sothoth for prez, Cthulhu for VP" had been the democrat/republican ticket.