I thought this was a joke, but it’s true .
Broward officials misplace 103,222 votes, but outcomes are unchanged
The polls opened on time and the new voting machines worked properly, but Broward County election officials couldn’t get the results right in Tuesday’s election.
Between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesday, the elections office found it had left 103,222 votes out of the total ballots cast, including 34,136 votes for the governor’s race – even though the total announced at 1 a.m. was given as a 100 percent count.
How could they lose this number of votes? What kind of incompetent morons were in charge of the process?
Where were the missing votes? Were they left in the pocket of the other pants?
I think most of the “missing” votes were absentee ballots. And they still got counted, they were just not taken into account when considering the total percentage of voter participation. CNN referred to it as a “spreadsheet” error.
I bet it’s the Democrats. Fucking Democrats.
The article gives the impression that 100,000 votes were mysteriously not accounted for, which is not true. This AP guy has a more lucid explanation.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20021107&Category=APP&ArtNo=211070923&Ref=AR
House race in recount, Broward had computer glitch
By DAVID ROYSE
Also Thursday, state elections officials had to explain what appeared to be another election foul-up reminiscent of the 2000 debacle.
Broward County officials appeared to discover more than 100,000 ballots, which they said was a “minor software thing.”
State Elections Director Ed Kast explained Thursday that the glitch involved only the count of how many total ballots were cast and had no effect on ballots being counted for each candidate.
Essentially, the county received absentee ballots and counted them for various candidates - but didn’t add some of them to the count of total votes cast, making turnout appear very low, Kast said.
They discovered the error before turning in the official results Thursday and corrected it.
“The Broward County canvassing board did an excellent job as they caught and corrected this discrepancy even before they submitted that county’s first set of unofficial returns,” said David Host, a spokesman for Secretary of State Jim Smith, who oversees elections.
Even now, the results aren’t final. Counties have until Nov. 16 to double-check their count and submit final results.
Unless, of course, it’s the Democrats. From the Sun-Sentinel story.
Some remained skeptical about what happened and raised the possibility that the county was double-counting votes. “It’s another screw-up, and I’m not satisfied this is correct,” Broward Republican leader George Lemieux said.
“It’s another Democrat screwup.” Uh huh.
You know, minty, he didnt say anything about Democrats.
It’s preposterous, and it’s non-partisan preposterous. I don’t mean to be a hectoring Canadian, 'cause God knows there’s too many of them on the Internet, but your physical election systems are a frigging shambles. A national system might be a good idea as opposed to the chaotic mess of crappy systems you have now.
It’s not limited to Broward County. My best friend lives in San Jose, and was disenfranchised for the second election in a row because of yet another fuckup at the DMV.
Thanks for your new cite, DDG . Note that the new AP story is in conflict with the OP cite from a day earlier, which said that the missing votes did affect election totals.
The additional votes didn’t change the outcome of any race, although state Rep. Nan Rich, D-Weston, widened her lead in a tough re-election bid.
Oh, c’mon, people–it’s voting .
In *** Florida.***
What did you expect?
Revtim
November 8, 2002, 3:34pm
8
[Daily Show]
So you’ve got Dueling Stringers. << shrug >>
In this corner, Scott Wyman of Knight-Ridder, filing his story on November 7. In the other corner, David Royse of AP, filing his story on November 8.
Here’s an in-depth discussion of what really happened, by locals.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/local/4461857.htm
Posted on Thu, Nov. 07, 2002
Broward County’s election didn’t end as smoothly as it began: A programming error sliced 34,000 votes from reported races on Tuesday, and 70,000 more were deducted from total turnout.
< snip >
Two things went wrong:
[ul][li]The English-language results of early voting were tabulated as if they come from one precinct. The total exceeded a preset maximum for a single precinct. Thus the 34,000 early votes were not included in the published totals for each race or in the overall turnout number.[/li]
‘‘The initial reports didn’t include everything we tabulated,’’ Deputy Supervisor Joe Cotter said. ‘‘It was a minor software thing. Once we realized it, we took the proper steps to fix it,’’ he said.
Hours after the close of voting on Tuesday, members of the canvassing board took notice of a discrepancy on printed summaries of the vote totals from each race. The reports showed more votes in the governor’s race than the reported total number of ballots cast.
‘‘That was the red flag,’’ said Charles Lindsey, an election monitor from the state Division of Elections.
Okay?
You see, this is why computerized voting makes me more nervous than hanging chads. Personally, I think it gives too much power to the programmer.
What’s to stop a staunch party line programmer to program a little “cheat” into the system where the computer disregard every x vote for a certain candidate? Or switches every 10th vote to the other party?
Thanks for the full story, DDG . These two sentences from your cite leave me feeling uncomfortable
The reports showed more votes in the governor’s race than the reported total number of ballots cast.
‘‘That was the red flag,’’ said Charles Lindsey, an election monitor from the state Division of Elections.
One is left to contemplate that a smaller error of only a couple of thousand votes might not have been a red flag, and might have gone undetected.
