Sunday, May 28, 2006

Addendum

The CIA Mind Control show that I appeared in on the Discovery Channel will be rebroadcast on June 3, and again on June 22. I hope you catch it. There's a lot of good information and a minimum of disinformation. I don't want to comment on it now - I just hope you catch it.

Meanwhile - I'm gathering stories like this one about how electronic voting is wreaking havoc in our primaries:
The current and future state of election reform depends on which expert or official you ask. Six years after the most controversial presidential election in modern history and a federally mandated overhaul of the voting process, a group of experts and election officials from around the country gathered in Washington to discuss reform efforts last month. The picture most of them painted wasn't very optimistic.

...Almost a dozen states that have already held primaries this year have experienced problems. In Pennsylvania's Allegheny County last week, officials found 750 uncounted absentee ballots. Apparently poll workers, using new equipment and procedures, mistakenly put the ballots in the wrong place.

In another Pennsylvania county, a local race was overturned because a worker's error while operating new machines resulted in a miscount. In Tuesday's Arkansas primary, officials in more than a dozen counties reported problems with new machines, necessitating a ballot count that stretched into the middle of the night. Election officials in some Arkansas counties told the Associated Press that the manufacturer of new electronic voting machines didn't provide programming equipment in time to adequately train poll workers.
I'm hoping to put together a longer piece about the state of the vote. But it will take time, and that's the thing I have least of these days. If you personally experienced a problem with voting in the last couple of years, I'd like to hear about it in the comments.

2 Comments:

Blogger Easemeister said...

My partner, in the last state general election, received two absentee ballots in the mail. Would they both have been counted had he voted twice? Don't know.

10:58 AM  
Blogger Real History Lisa said...

Ideally, no. Possibly, yes. And possibly, neither counted. I don't know for a fact that the absentee ballots are counted in California because they aren't included in the 1% manual audit required by law in my state. So we don't really know if they were counted, or counted correctly.

That needs to change. Absentee ballot numbers should be counted as part of the precinct in which the voter lives.

By 1% manual audit, that means 100% of the votes in 1% of the precincts should be counted by hand. And the precincts to be counted by hand are SUPPOSED to be chosen on a surprise basis. So far, neither has happened.
Precincts are routinely selected in advance, and with electronic voting machines, "manual" audit has meant manually pressing a button on a computer to rerun the totals.

That's why I'm in favor of Rush Holt's bill HR 550 - it raises the base audit to 2% (raising the probability of detecting a fraudulent precinct result from 76% to 96% in CA), and mandates that the voter verified paper audit trail be counted by hand.

9:06 PM  

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