Posted on 11/05/2010 8:27:35 AM PDT by Red Badger
In what has become one of the stranger twists in an already bizarre Governor's race, a bag of uncounted ballots was found in Bridgeport Thursday night.
Republican officials were approached by Democratic operatives and told about the surprise ballot bag, according to Bridgeport GOP Chairman Marc Delmonico.
“It adds to the inconsistencies from the Democratic Party in Bridgeport. It just keeps adding to it,” said Delmonico. “There’s nothing odd about it; there’s certainly nothing missing about it,” said Ed Maley, a representative for the Democratic Party.
Delmonico said Democrats asked to have several people deputized to count the uncounted ballots, but Republicans objected, claiming that wasn't proper procedure in the vote-counting process.
“These ballots are getting extraordinarily heightened scrutiny. They’re being dealt with in a public fashion, an open public process so that everyone can witness it,” said Mark Anastasi, the city attorney for Bridgeport.
Instead the GOP asked police to take custody of the bag of ballots until the matter could be sorted out.
The votes could be pivotal in the race for Governor, in which neither candidate has conceded defeat.
Wednesday, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz declared Democrat Dan Malloy the "unofficial" winner, but numbers released by her office show Republican Tom Foley still leading Malloy by more than 8,000 votes. Those totals do not include any of the vote totals from the City of Bridgeport.
Bridgeport has become the focal point of what has turned into a circus of an election.
A ballot shortage led to long lines on Election Day, and a judge issuing an order to keep polls open until 10 p.m. Tuesday, two hours longer than every other town in the state.
Because of the shortage, many of the votes cast Tuesday were done so on photocopied ballots.
Election officials began counting those ballots just after 5 p.m. Thursday when the new bag of uncounted ballots was discovered.
Bysiewicz said she didn't expect the vote totals from Bridgeport to be submitted to her until Friday at the earliest.
Exactly. Electronic voting should never, ever, occur. If your vote matters, demand paper.
This is why I always vote early. I can ensure use of a paper ballot.
Found them in a desk drawer at the ACORN office. :)
Hey look what I just found in my trunk? Bag full of filled out ballots should we count them uh uh? Liberal Democrat Judge rules you bet count the ballots we don’t want to disenfranchise anyone!
Dem wymin?
Are you sure you really want to go down this road???
CA....
But it'll never work, and never, ever be implemented.
You know why?
Because it's RACIST!!!!
Shame on you! Have you no compassion for the minorities, the indigents, and the numerous dead who would be forced to jump through unconscionable hoops just to exercise their Democrat-given right to vote????
Shame on you!!!!
CA....
Well that depressed me.
What would work?
() When voters sign in to vote, their voter id should be entered into a physical log book, and a computer system.
() Attach a printer to each electronic voting machine.
() Allow the electronic voting machine to record the vote electronicly.
() When the voter elecronicly casts his ballot, the attached printer prints a paper copy of the votes cast by the voter—with both english text and scannable bar codes to indicate the vote. Plus an id identifying the specific voting machine and vote number on that machine.
() The voter visually scans the print out to verify his votes were recorded properly.
() The voter places th print out into a scanner that reads the barcodes and records the votes again. The data from the barcode votes is displayed to the voter, who verifies it was read correctly or not. The barcode data can be electronicly transmitted to a central database.
() Besides reading the barcodes, the scanner does a complete page scan of the print out and creates a single image file (probably a tiff format) of the print out. The image file can be transmitted to a central database.
() The print out itself is then deposited into a lock box just like traditional paper ballots.
You now have 4 copies of the vote produced by two different systems. Two electronic (voting machine & scanner) and two “physical” (a paper copy & an image file).
The total number of voters that signed in to the precient should match the total number of ballots cast by the voting machines, scanner, and electronic tiffs (these numbers can be validated quickly by computer), and if they don’t match it will raise a red flag.
The total number of ballots for each machine will match the number of scanned ballots with that machine’s id (again, a non-match will raise a red flag).
If there is a question about a machine’s ballots, the tiff files for that voting machine can be pulled up in a matter of seconds to verify the machine’s accuracy.
In the case of a recount, the physical paper print out (which was approved by the voter) can be read to determine the will of the voter.
Bridgeport is the city that elected P.T. Barnum as mayor, but when was that? He knew about “suckers” but claimed he never made such a remark.
Ok You may actually have a fraud proof system here.
copyrighted right now. Or whatever IT types do with ideas.
I suggest you make a call on every SOS in each State.
Be sure to do the Cost/Benefit analysis (lawsuits, recounts etc etc.
The 1st thing that popped into my head was INSTANT results. No more of this waiting for a precenct to get the votes in. I LIKE THIS!
You’re right - I stand corrected - I was thinking about the sign in process - cross reference the book or the cards from each polling station in Bridgeport
Why do Democrats always object to voter IDs?
Why do Democrats always object to poll watchers?
I have been an election judge here in Champaign County Illinois for 4 years or so. The system we use is a scanner. The voter is issued a paper ballot with an election judge’s initials on it, fills in ovals, verifies with another election judge that the ballot indeed has the first judge’s initials on it and feeds it into the scanner. The scanned ballot is routed into a locked box. The scanner produces a results tape at the end of the day with the election results. Write-ins need to be manually counted since the scanner does not have the smarts to recognize anything other than the existence of a filled in oval.
The county clerk estimates number of voters who will show up at each each precinct. That is all the ballots that get printed. They come in packages of 100. Most of the time, the ballot for each precinct is unique due to candidates and issues on the ballot. Each voter application is numbered in sequence, thus keeping track of the number of voters. If the number of voters is more than a certain number at 3 different times in the day, the judges are instructed to order more ballots. The clerk then prints group. We had a higher turnout than expected at about 4 in the afternoon and decided to order more ballots. It turned out that we didn’t need them, but all the judges had to sign give a reason for ordering the additional ballots. Each had to be accounted for.
At the end of the day the ballots are removed from the locked box (didn’t see any Social Security in there) and sealed with numbered plastic ties in the box in which the ballots came in the morning. The ballots, election results tape and scanner memory card are transported to county building by two of the election judges, one Dem & one Pub.
This system seems to be less subject to fraud than many others, although I have reason to suspect the accuracy of the filled oval recognition system.
As an immigrant from a 3rd world country I am truly amazed by how bad and flawed the voting system(s) in the most technologically advanced country in the world is.
All reports of voter fraud here in the USA reminds me of what happens with Mugabe elections in Zimbabwe, or Zuma elections in South Africa!!!!!
Surely we are better than that!!
Surely the USA can find a more secure and standardized voting system that is not so full of holes that any 3rd world hick can defraud it.
I am not a citizen yet, but when I achieve that lofty goal and head for the polls to cast my first vote as a full fledged US citizen, I really, really expect my vote to count for something and not have to walk out of the polling station wondering if this was not all just smoke and mirrors and was all a rigged farce to make me believe my vote actually meant something.
ping
“Did I mention that the self proclaimed winner, Democrat Russ Carnahan, is the brother of the Missouri Secretary of State, Robin Carnahan?”
Recall, that after the 2000 Presidential election, it was George Soros who made a point of how important it was for Democrats to gain control of the Secretary of State’s office in the individual states.
Do mysteriously appearing ballots EVER go for the republicans? EVER?
I’ve worked with document scanners. Their accuracy is extremely high.
A few loopholes I noticed:
() The ballots are live the moment they are printed. What prevents someone from stealing a box (or having a few extra printed up), filling them out, faking some initials (not that hard), and then declaring they found a box in the back of a car?
You might try a multi-step system to make the ballot go live.
When the ballot is issued to a voter, instead of initialing it, the ballot number should be entered (or scanned with a gun) into a database. This will associate a timestamp, poll-worker, and polling-place with the physical ballot. Ballots that are not added to the system in this manner never go live, and thus can’t be used if they fall into the wrong hands.
But the ballot still isn’t live.
When the voter gets the ballot from the first person, he takes it to a 2nd table, where a poll-worker affixes a “validation sticker” to the ballot (some sort of holographic sticker with a unique number and barcode). The 2nd poll-worker scans the ballot number & validation sticker number into a database. This associates a 2nd timestamp with the ballot, the two numbers, polling place, and 2nd poll-worker.
The ballot is now live.
The people that handle the raw ballots, and the people that handle the validation stickers should not be the same, and neither should ever handle the other. Their should be clear chain of custody for both the ballots and stickers.
The ballots are useless without the stickers. The stickers are useless without the ballots. And even a ballot with a sticker is useless unless both have been properly scanned into the ballot database.
I’ve become very concerned about voter fraud. There are are a lot of smart people on FR. If we put our heads together, we could not only come up with some real improvements, but push for a real change.
And I really think the first move is to stiffen the pentalties for voter fraud, just to put everyone on notice how serious it is. I’m not kidding when I say voter fraud is treason, and I think it would be reasonable to amend the definition of treason found in the Constitution to include voter fraud.
Thanks for the ping!
That’s a shrewd question.
Change two letters in the word “ballot”.
Cmon now.
At least America is again good at something—be proud of your countrymen.
A global leader once again!
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