Minn. Senate race could hinge on scanning machine mistakes

[DS1]

Source: Some freakin nerd

Fears of e-voting glitches in the November election are still not over. The outcome of the Minnesota Senate race--which could give the Democrats a firmer grasp on power in Washington--may depend on whether scanning machines made mistakes two weeks ago when tabulating ballots.

Republican Sen. Norm Coleman holds a lead of only about 200 votes over his main opponent, Democrat Al Franken, but a hand recount that begins Wednesday could show that a few thousand votes were mistakenly rejected.

With Coleman's lead under a margin of 0.5 percent of the more than 2.9 million votes cast in the Minnesota senate race on November 4, the state automatically begins a hand recount of every ballot.

Minnesota used optical scanning machines to read paper ballots, and enough ballots could have been mistakenly rejected by the machines to alter the outcome of the race, said Beth Fraser, director of governmental affairs for the Minnesota secretary of state's office. The office estimates that as many as two votes for every 1,000 cast--or as many as 6,000--may have been mistakenly rejected.

The optical scanners would have rejected ballots that were not filled out correctly--for instance, if a voter circled a candidate's name rather than filling in the bubble next to the name, Fraser said. However, Minnesota law mandates that any vote in which the voter's intention is clear must be counted. In other words, the law is more liberal than the machines, and a manual recount could permit votes to be counted that a machine would reject.

"We have a pretty clear statute of what counts as a vote," Fraser said.

Starting Wednesday, election officials in 106 locations throughout the state will start sorting through ballots, paying particular attention to those that were rejected to decide whether they should be counted.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10101827-38.html?tag=nl.e703

[truthisfreedom]

1. Go AL! We won Alaska, now we gotta win this thing in Minnesota!

WOOHOO! :bounce:

[Stevepol]

2. No kidding? I thought the machines were infallible.

On the other hand, there's the theory, espoused by tin hats, that the machines might be purposely programmed to reject a certain percentage of votes for some candidate as un-readable (Read: Franken) or re-direct a certain percentage of votes for a certain candidate (Read: Franken) to another candidate.

Of course, we know such a thing couldn't happen in this country since we are the greatest democracy in the universe and we always honor the people's will.

[endarkenment]

3. no tin foil required

With a 200 vote margin, the spoiled ballots with clear intent could simply be randomly distributed and still alter the outcome. A win for Franken does not require any conspiracy theory.

[Beaverhausen]

4. The polls had Franken ahead before the election, correct?

I can't remember...

[recoveringdittohed]

5. Some polls had Franken ahead and some had Coleman

The election day thread on Senate polling and projections from FiveThirtyEight.com had in the 2 weeks leading up to the election four polls with Franken up 4 to 6 points and 4 polls with Coleman ahead by 3 to 6 points. So the pollsters and the voters seem to have said flip a coin.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/final-senate-projection-114-7-8.html#comments

[Borgnine]

6. Scanning machines are a lot more reliable than electronic.

At least we have the ready-made paper ballots that clearly show the voter's intent. Had this all been on Diebold machines, it would have been called for Coleman weeks ago.

[No Elephants]

7. As long as machines are involved, programming hanky panky is possible. But, at least paper ballots

exist for the recount.