READ THIS Before You Vote on Tuesday!
I’m not big with the all-caps shouting, but this is important stuff, and knowing it could be the difference between your vote counting or not. Thanks to Danny and Don for highlighting it.
From the Tuscaloosa News:
Vote with care
Although Tuscaloosa County machines flag errors and allow voters to recast erroneous ballots, the tickets present several opportunities to make mistakes. A vote won’t count if:
A Republican delegate but no candidate is selected
Democratic delegates who are not committed to the candidate chosen are selected.
More than five Democratic delegates
Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo and Fred Thompson, all of whom have dropped out, are selected on the Republican ticket.
Joe Biden, Christopher J. Dodd and Bill Richardson, all of whom have dropped out, are selected on the Democratic ticket.
For both parties, a voter may select a candidate without selecting any delegates.
Read the whole article. I’m thinking about printing it out and taking it with me.
Happily, Alabama uses paper ballots read by optical scanners, so we don’t have to worry about computers eating our votes.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:18 pm
It’s come to having to print newspaper articles and taking them to the polls. I hope voters can and will read this before they vote on Tuesday, but then again this is Alabama where the literacy rate is one of the lowest in the nation…
February 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Kathy: “Happily, Alabama uses paper ballots read by optical scanners, so we don’t have to worry about computers eating our votes.”
Kathy, what we need to worry about in Alabama and in every state that uses electronic machines to tabulate and report vote results is whether those machines have been tampered with to produce and report false results, WHICH CAN BE DONE.
I’ve been concerned about this for some time now, and I asked Ed Packard in the Alabama Secretary of State office if such skullduggery is possible with the machines we use. He replied, saying that it is possible with any electronic voting machine.
If you want confirmation of his reply I may still have it stored away in a file and would be happy to send it to you if I can find it.
We need to forget about having almost immediate results for the public and go back to paper ballots that are hand counted under strict supervision by all concerned. Haste makes waste.
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Don, I agree that any technology can be hacked if someone is determined to do so and has access, but I think optical scanners give us the best of both worlds. Citizens use paper ballots, which are preserved and can be recounted if necessary, while using the scanners gives us faster access to the results. The hand recount in New Hampshire showed very little change in the vote totals from primary night. There’s no way our fast-moving world is going back to 100% hand counts, but with paper ballots and optical scanners we still have the paper trail.
February 3rd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Kathy, while not disputing your comment above, if the NH machines weren’t tampered with very little change should be expected in the machine totals and those reached through a hand recount of paper ballots. There will always be the possibility of some small differences, for whatever reasons.
That said, unless someone requests a hand count of paper ballots and the request is honored under procedures of our election laws, no one would ever know if there might be a large and meaningful discrepancy between the totals arrived at by a hand count and those reported as accurate that came from the machines and decided the winner of an election.
Think back to the hung chads in FL that took us all the way to SCOTUS to decide an election. That may have been caused by just a malfunction of the machines that didn’t punch cards adequately.
But, think back to when Bob Riley was first elected to be Alabama’s governor and the changed results at the zero hour down in a county in south Alabama (was it Baldwin County?). That could have possibly been as a result of tampering with the machines.
We need paper ballots, and we need thoroughly supervised hand counting of them, rather than relying on machine generated totals, to even hope for a true result and honest elections. Anyone who is impatient to learn the results should just take two aspirin and come back in the morning…….or whenever.