Posted on 12/05/2006 8:21:10 AM PST by flutters
CLEVELAND (AP) — Thousands of people cast ballots in Cuyahoga County on Election Day without signing in at their polling places, the latest voting mishap for a county where problems in the May primary delayed results six days.
Nearly 12,000 people voted illegally Nov. 7 in the state's most populous county. More people voted than signed in at 533 of 570 precincts, according to board of elections records.
“We need to bring in the booth officials and find out what happened,” elections board Chairman Bob Bennett said at a meeting Monday. “We paid a lot of money for training.”
Elections officials believe people got in voting lines without realizing they first had to show identification, as required by state law, and sign the elections book. Workers assigned to give voters computer cards to operate voting machines then failed to check whether the voters had signed in and showed ID.
Ballots are anonymous, so officials cannot determine which were cast illegally.
“We had too many reports from the polling places that people got in line without going through the precinct tables,” said Candice Hoke, director of the Cleveland State University's Center for Election Integrity, which monitored the election. “That should not be allowed to continue. There should be some quality control.”
Poll workers were trained to give voters their cards at the table where they signed in, said Gwen Dillingham, deputy director of the elections board.
Errors can occur as poll workers adapt to electronic voting, elections officials said.
Because of concerns about a repeat of problems from the primary, the county spent millions more than budgeted in November to cover poll worker training, extra voting machines and other measures.
The general election ran more smoothly, although a judge ordered 16 polling locations to stay open an extra 90 minutes because early voting machine problems caused delays.
12,000??????
Color me surprised! NOT!
"More people voted than signed in at 533 of 570 precincts"
Let me be the first to don the tin-foil and say that can't be an accident.
Just business as usual by the Rat-run local government.
But its the Republicans who are always accused of vote fraud...
Or twice...or more.
I assume no Republicans were elected or this would be a scandal of Watergate proportion.
This has worked in Philly precincts that regularly record more votes than registered voters, so why are we surprised that the Dems in Ohio adopted this tactic? Just wait till Hellery's hackers get hold of those Diebolds in '08. There will be MILLIONS more votes than people recorded in every state.
Or poll workers used computer cards that were not ever related to anyone's signing in. Cheating in this was seems extremely easy, so easy that any poll worker could figure it out. Who put in the cards this way would not be traceable in any way.
In Maryland the number of signed pieces of paper placed in an envelope attached to each voting maching was supposed to match the number of votes on that machine. I wonder if Ohio even has a system like that. If it does, did anyone check? These numbers were supposed to be checked hourly.Then again, the big cities so often come in hours after everyone else's. Happy extra voting time???
In our system, you check in with your ID, and you are given a cardboard pass. You then have to wait in another line, and you give your cardboard pass to the worker who gives you the electronic card to use for the voting machine, right before you go to the electronic machine.
This keeps people from walking out with the electronic machines, allows a division of labor, but also means that you could get a voting cardboard pass and give it to another person NOT registered to vote.
But of course that would give up your own vote, and since they could have just told you how to vote, it's not THAT big of a hole in security.
Sounds like THIS county has a real problem getting good help, but also sounds like they didn't have an intermediate identifier like our cardboard voting passes.
I will say that a LOT of people came to our polling place and got into the post-registration line by mistake. They usually were told quickly, or figured out that all the other people in the line were holding these pink-red cards.
But if we didn't have those cards, I could see them getting to vote without checking in.
Probably most of these people were legally registered, and simply didn't check in.
I worry more when I find out that more people voted than were legally ALLOWED to vote in a precinct, because that's a sure sign of fraud.
BTW, at our precinct, about once an hour they stop people for a minute, collect the totals from all the signin books and the machines, and reconcile them -- so if they DID have someone doing it wrong, they'd know pretty quickly.
During 2005, they had a 3-vote mistake and it took them an hour to find it but they finally found that they had missed counting three signatures so it was OK.
Liberals doing what they do best; cheat.
I think it can be an accident, it's pretty easy to walk in and pick the wrong line, and if you don't have any indicators otherwise the next people in will follow the previous people and you get a lot of mistakes.
We verify our sign-ins and machine counts regularly during the day, if they did that they'd have known early on they were messing up.
I know I had to show ID and sign, but I'm a white guy. They may do it different "downtown".
No party affiliation mentioned ... gee, let me guess. /sarc
Democrats voted (two, three times as usual)
Last time I voted in that county, I saw someone come back for a second helping of franchise goodness. He had signed in before, and the poll worker noticed that -- hard not to, I guess -- but let him vote anyway. They also managed to drop me from the registry, but let me vote regardless. I guess I managed to cancel out the two-timer, if nothing else.
73.78% RAT (Gov)
68.99% RAT (SecState)
71.61% RAT (Treas)
64.38% RAT (AttyGen)
62.19% RAT (Auditor)
70.51% RAT (US Senator, DeWine got 29.4%)
66.41% Kucinich (US Rep)
That last one says it all.
RAMPANT DEMOCRATIC FRAUD
“We need to bring in the booth officials and find out what happened,” elections board Chairman Bob Bennett said at a meeting Monday. “We paid a lot of money for training.”
If you hire the guys who can't figure out a butterfly ballot to be your booth officials, then you've gotta expect this.
Gee, ya think? Rats in a Rat town. 12,000 people who just happened to slip by.
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