RIGGED? NY Times: Unofficial Tallies in City Understated Obama Vote

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Cross posted in late breaking news here
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3184491&mesg_id=3184715

Unofficial Tallies in City Understated Obama Vote

A sign supporting Senator Barack Obama on Primary Day in Harlem. Some districts reported that no one had voted for him.

Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district.

City election officials this week said that their formal review of the results, which will not be completed for weeks, had confirmed some major discrepancies between the vote totals reported publicly — and unofficially — on primary night and the actual tally on hundreds of voting machines across the city.

In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136. In an even more heavily black district in Brooklyn — where the vote on primary night was recorded as 118 to 0 for Mrs. Clinton — she now barely leads, 118 to 116.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/nyregion/16vote.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

If the official count continues in Obama's favor, he may gain a delegate or two.

[Buzz Clik]

1. Gee. What an unlucky coincidence.

Give him a few votes, a delegate or two, and sweep it under the carpet.

[Bonn1997]

10. This seems too blatant

to have been planned by Diebold. (How are the votes counted in NY?) Zero votes for Obama in many districts? You'd think no one would be dumb enough to take that approach to rigging an election!

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

13. Lever machines

its not clear how much of it was the machines, and how much was the reporting.

[Andreshunter77]

16. Obama would have said something if this had been relevant

It seems to me that the errors were minimal.

[DS1]

2. 379 votes in Harlem

or a tiny area of Harlem, because that's a ludicrously low total

[blm]

9. Isn't that exactly what happened at some Ohio precincts that registered IMPOSSIBLE outcomes?

We know who rigged it there, so who is rigging it here? And how did they get the cooperation of the vote counters to make it happen?

[goclark]

3. And those were the ones that got caught nt

Just the tip of the iceburg

[BeFree]

4. No way!

We have been told time and again that the way NY counts votes is always correct. That the screwed up exit-polls from NY City in 2004 were because the exit-pollers were screwy, and that the count from the levers couldn't be corrupted.

Now who can we believe?

[Bill Bored]

14. Believe THIS:

Sam Roberts' report in this morning's New York Times is really old news to
any experienced New York City politicoes. At the close of the polls, the
election inspectors manually copy the numbers from the voting machines onto
the "canvass report," which is prepared in triplicate. One copy goes to the
borough office of the Board of Elections together with all provisional and
emergency ballots. A second copy is maintained by the local police precinct.
A third copy is used by a clerk at the local police precinct who types the
numbers into the police department main frame computer, which is immediately
available to the Election News Service. After being typed at the local
police precinct, the third copy goes to the Election News Service.

Everyone in New York knows that these numbers are very unreliable and
inaccurate. Most of the local Democratic clubs have watchers present at the
close of the polls who record the numbers independently. In this particular
race, most clubs had both Obama and Clinton supporters who freely shared
their numbers. It has been my experience that the numbers collected by the
local political organizations are much more accurate than the numbers
distributed to the media through their collective, Election News Service.

The NY Time did accurately note that Clinton had the first column in New
York and Obama had the fifth column. Therefore, it was a relatively easy
typographical error for the clerk at the Police Department. It has been my
experience that almost all of the errors are police clerk typos, rather than
transcription errors by the the election inspectors who prepare the canvass
reports.

The silver lining is that because everyone knows that these election night
numbers are filled with typographical errors, no one I know (except the
media!) ever relies of these numbers. New York has a mandatory, 100%
recanvass, which both election officials and the political candidates
generally take very seriously, even when the races are not close. Although I
don't have the exact percentages for this presidential primary, absentee
ballots are typically 3.5% of the total and, in New York City, valid
provisional ballots are about 2% of the total. It is extraordinarily rare
to have any argument over the numbers ultimately certified.


Douglas A. Kellner
Co-Chair
New York State Board of Elections

[shireen]

5. something stinks

How can we ever trust the electoral system? :(

[BeFree]

6. Good question: How?

The only way to regain any trust is to go back to people counting votes cast by people on paper.

This current wave of letting machines do the work is fraught with all kinds of perils, mistakes, glitches, worms and viruses.

Sure, people can conspire to steal a few votes here and there, but machines as we all know, can steal thousands of votes in the blink of an eye.

Now there will be some who will argue that we need to compromise away our right to have votes counted by people with the argument that people aren't capable of counting pieces of paper: that machines are far more capapble.

Screw them. As far as I can tell we can't count on them.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

7. in this case, the issue is declaring a winner prior to canvass

I am hearing that NY's election night results seldom match the official results following the canvass.


This is because the polling place results are transcribed incorrectly, and then at canvass this
is checked and caught.

Still, I wonder if the thing was rigged.

But what with Clinton's folks selling the message of "you don't dare hope that a black man can be elected", its possible they convinced people that their vote for Obama was futile.

[BeFree]

8. That there's what ya call an understatement, eh?

Because, as the NYT reports:


In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136.

I'd have to say there is something totally fucked up. And how many times has it happened?

[Wilms]

12. And here I thought this was the Election Reform forum, NOT GD: Partisanship

"...its possible they convinced people that their vote for Obama was futile."



































































:eyes:

[DS1]

11. or just make a large system of turnstiles

with counters above them that simply add one for each person passing through. It sounds archaic, but with people watching, there's no way to cheat the system.

I guess that would make voting not-so-private, but oh well

[Bill Bored]

15. That's almost exactly how the lever machines work.

Except no one can see the votes increment -- only the number of ballots cast. You've got the right idea though!