While most of the media is reporting the huge Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate tonight, and the big GOP wins in a whole bunch of Governor’s races, Reuters notices that there were a lot of problems for voters across the country today…
Although a full picture of the problems was not yet clear, officials and voting rights advocates reported machine failures in North Carolina and Texas, polling breakdowns in a key Florida county and an overall increase in the number of people reporting they were turned away for lack of proper identification.
They go on to summarize election problems and failures in a bunch of states, most of which we covered in one form or another earlier today (including many more). But we missed this really bizarre case of still-unexplained very dirty tricks out of Chicago earlier today…
Officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties in the city denied involvement in the calls, which an election board official said appeared to target a particular party that he declined to identify.
So, WTF is that about? Chicago’s CBS affiliate has much more, reporting that election officials called “the severe shortage of judges ‘much worse than ever before.’ Some polling places had no election judges, or only one, when they were supposed to open at 6 a.m.”
In the meantime, as elections were being targeted in the heavily Democratic stronghold of Chicago, the GOP reportedly went on to take control of the Governor’s mansion in Illinois, with Republican Bruce Rauner claiming victory over incumbent Democratic incumbent Governor Pat Quinn.
Quinn, to his credit, refused to concede with the unverified computer-tallied results reported from 98% of state precincts, giving Rauner, who declared victory, a reported 51-46 point lead as of 11:30pm local time.
“I don’t believe in throwing in the towel while votes are being counted,” Quinn told supporters. “We will never yield until all the votes are in.”
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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If the mainstream corporate media had actual integrity, it would bluntly state this fact: Democracy in the United States of America has ended. Outside of the USA, just about everyone in the world knows it. China can justifiably give the finger to any sanctimonious speeches from the United States about democracy. Protesters in Hong Kong don’t realize that the situation they’re protesting is actually far better than the current one in the United States. RIP US democracy.
Wow, 2000 election judges..seems like in this day and age it wouldn’t be hard to figure where calls came from.
Just wondering how politcal parties perform differently in states with unverifiable machines and states with all or mostly all paper ballots with proper auditing. MN seems like a fairly secure election system, with papare ballots, computer counts but automatic hand recounts of randomly selected precincts. We seem to perform differently than other states.
Anybody know why Oregon was apparently the only state in the union where the election results were pretty much as expected, with zero surprises, zero anomalies, and what appears to be an even stronger “left” tendency today?
Let’s see: We had a marijuana measure, to entice the younger crowd to vote. We have mail-in ballots (I know you don’t like our mail-in system, Brad, but dammit, it works for us), we had a GMO measure to entice everybody, and we had a pretty good senator who needed to win again.
Now consider this: We had a miserable FAILURE of an ObamaCare web site, we no longer have major progressive radio stations, we had Koch money dumped on us, and we have a re-elected governor (D) in the middle of his own personal scandals.
Yet Oregon voters did not “send a message” by electing cons, criminals, liars, thieves, and nutcases. Why not?
Why are things still normal here, yet the rest of the country seems to feel that Koch leadership and money, climate-change denial, privatization of SS, destruction of ObamaCare, corporate authoritarianism, and on and on and on…are the waves of the future?
With the exception of Oregon, the rest of this doesn’t pass the smell test. Not. One. Bit.
Ax 12 hours ago: “Jim Allen, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners…. and Cook County Clerk David Orr, who was in charge of suburban county votes outside the city, warned about the large number of mailed-in absentee ballots still to be counted, as well as provisional ballots.
The IL A.G. stated that they cannot be “processed” until 7p.m. Tuesday, never mind when received.
Due to precinct delays some were open later with votes after 7 being considered provisional until being authenticated.
“Allen said the election board had scrambled all day to deal with a rash of no-show judges, the result of what he called “a new dirty trick” in politics.”
“According to Allen, some 6,000 judges, “all affiliated with one political party,” received robocalls over the weekend telling them they had to attend another training session before Tuesday’s election. Because of that, he estimated more than 2,000 judges failed to show up…
Allen said the board dealt with it, as it had 10,000 judges prepared to cover the city’s 2,069 precincts….
“It’s interference in the election process,” said board Chairman Langdon Neal, adding that it would be a felony offense.”
Dnainfo.COM
The first thing I though of when I heard that Gov. Brownback (R-Kansas) had been reelected was “gotta go see what Brad and bloggers there think.”
There are some mysteries for sure (Oil-Qaeda Wins Big).
Just sayin’ …
the polls were not so far off on general trend of election, Repubs were expected to pick up 7ish seats, but they got more – but the polls were way off on margins, all got it wrong to the left. Seems weird given they could look at 2010 turnout and figure something between that and 2012 and would have gotten demographics pretty right. VA tie race that was supposed to be +7 or +10 and Walkers huge margin in a supposedly close race stand out as really weird to me. Wonder if there is anyway to compare to other states, voting methods etc.
In addition to non-deliberate screwups in some polling places, I’m guessing that at least some of the screwups are done deliberately in order to discourage some people from voting in the current and future elections. This would include screwups which seem to favor Democrats, so that the scheme looks less partisan than it really is. Also, any poll shenanigans that ostensibly favor Democrats will also rile up the Republican base, increasing their turnout.
The results here in Ohio are way off Democrats lost big here people in local offices in my county who are very popular lost. Kasich was going to win but 86 of 88 counties? I had to click all my choices at least twice to get it to stay on the Democratic Candidate. Husted, Dewine ect. ect. won by larger than expected margins. I feel sick
Karen @ 6:
You may have already seen these but, if not, they may be helpful in response to your comment. They’re from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight today. He describes what happened as “Democratic bias” in the pre-election polls. FWIW, no ink is given to the possibility that election results may be skewed, rather than the many different independent pre-election polls.
In his article concerning a “Democratic skew” in the polls, he notes, as you do, that the polls were off within the margin of error, but that what makes them odd is the fact that almost all of them were off in one direction, rather than the 50/50 red/blue difference that one might expect from margins of error.