The conspiracy theorists at the New York Times today tell us something is amiss, but proceed to ultimately tell us nothing about why it happened, suggesting that all is just fine…and that it’d be even better if the city “upgraded” to new electronic voting machines…
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.
So how did the numbers change from 141-0 to 261-136 and from 118-0 to 118-116? No confirmed explanation is given, but some lazy guesswork about how votes are counted on NYC’s old lever voting machines is proffered by local Election Officials, and dutifully passed on by the Times who — before proceeding with a misleading “ad” for new electronic systems — soothes our concerns by informing us that an unspecified number (“a handful”) of districts also reported zero votes for Clinton in the original, unofficial tallies…
“It looked like a lot of the numbers were wrong, probably the result of human error,†said Marcus Cederqvist, who was named executive director of the Board of Elections last month. He said such discrepancies between the unofficial and final count rarely affected the raw vote outcome because “they’re not usually that big.â€
The Times then goes on to inform us that, though all of this is probably just business as usual in the Big Apple, “for those inclined to consider conspiracy theories, the figures provided plenty of grist.”
Despite what the irresponsible leaders of the Daily Kos and other such self-destructive supposedly-Progressive blogsites enjoy suggesting, The BRAD BLOG, takes no position on whether such matters are the result of evil-doing, computer error, human error, or anything else, unless we can actually prove such things.
(Side note with hat-tip to reader “BY”: We just saw that Election Fraud Self-Dillusionist, Markos Moulitsas himself covered this matter earlier today, and reveals his ignorance about all things Election Integrity, in this point he makes in re: one of the items in the NYTimes story: “That paragraph sort of implies that the voting machines don’t spit out paper ballots? That should be SOP for these things.” Um…geez Kos, read the paper lately? No, NYC’s machines don’t “spit out paper ballots”, they still use lever machines, which seems like something someone as authoritative as you pretend to be on such matters really ought to know by now. We’d even go so far as to say that familiarizing oneself with facts before writing about them should be SOP for these things, eh?)
For the moment, the New York Times offers little evidence for anything, even while it draws a bead on those big nasty lever voting machines (NY is one the last places in the country to still use them), as somehow the root of the problem, as exacerbated by “human error”, of course.
It’s worth noting here that Election Integrity folks in New York have been in the midst of a pitched battle with the state, NYC, and even the Dept. of Justice as they try to ensure that NY’s move to “upgraded” voting systems will include paper ballot systems.
Notable then, is a graphic that runs along with the Times article (reposted at bottom of this article) explaining how tallies are collected from NY’s lever machines and then — for some reason — collected on a computer. Those tallies are then given to Associated Press (instead of to election officials), which demonstrates that yes, computers do come into play in NY’s system, and could as well be the root of the problem, along with human error, bad lever machines, or anything else.
That same graphic goes on to compare NYC’s system, in use for decades, to Cook County (Chicago), IL’s system — implemented in 2006 according to a member of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project and John Gideon of VotersUnite.org — to report that “Discrepancies with the unofficial result are common” in NYC, over in Cook County, where they only recently changed to electronic voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, “Discrepancies are rare.”
In addition to the absurd comparison of systems in use for decades, versus a system in use for just a couple of elections, it also caught our eye, since we recall hearing of one problem after another in recent Cook County elections. Suggesting discrepancies as “rare” in a county that has only been using these new systems for a couple of elections seems odd enough, but a closer look at the reported problems on those systems seem to point out that they are not so “rare” at all.
Here’s just a few of the issues revealed during a quick search for Cook County in VotersUnite.org’s “Election Problem Log” database (a collection of problems as reported by mostly MSM outlets) over the last election or three there:
Other than that, Mrs. Land-of-Lincoln, the play was great, and Cook County is a wonderful role model for New York City!
As is too often the case these days, the reporting of the New York Times on this, and other matters, is just this side of worthless.
I’ll say it
NYC is a stronghold of the Rube Goldberg election machine system.
The motto: you want numbers … you get numbers …
I love how the director of a Board of Elections can say something like, “It looked like a lot of the numbers were wrong.” and then immediately excuse it away. Gotta love personal accountability.
I guess I could see someone looking at the wrong corresponding counter in the back to lever being flipped, but that still doesn’t explain why Clintons vote doubled on that one precinct.
Who knows ?
…another thing, why did this happen to so many machines throughout so many precincts ?
We need real standards Mr. Conyers
Shoot, this is like the United States of Tammany Hall…what year is this ?
Pass this one around
Government is Not a Business
I voted in NYC on those same lever machines we’ve had since the dawn of man. After reading this article in today’s New York Times I felt sick. It made me sick that the so-called “angle” on this story was so incredibly vague. Is no one willing to take a stand and just say what is so painfully obvious, that the New York primary was a complete and total sham. It is criminally negligent for our elections to be carried out in this manner. It doesn’t matter who you voted for. It just doesn’t matter.
Great title. “0” Bama. Very painful to see this crap going on in a “democratic” primary.
Its time for a change. Please keep us up to date with more specifics going forward.
Thank you for the graphics – I didn’t notice them in the NY Times first go round.
I am really worried about election cheating in Ohio and Texas, two of the worst states in the country.
ON NOTICE: Cuyahoga Co Ohio, and Bexar County Texas.
Generally concerned about party machine candidate Hillary trying to become the nominee with insider help. Her supporter, Gov. Ed Rendell, PA, just spoke of how hard to elect an AA man (guess that could be his excuse), and all the other states, Ohio redux, with Bill and Hill’s win by all means possible. These Harlem districts are Rangel’s, the Clinton supporter who introduced us to the candidate for the Senate, saying it was his idea.
Without making this a political post, we need procedures and laws to prevent as much insider fraud as possible, before an election winner is announced.
Whooaa Flo # 6, RIGHTEOUS ARTICLE!
Hey Marjorie #9, I live here in PA and we’ve been calling him fast eddy for quite a while! Hear he just loves those danaher (sp ?) machines!
What I want to know, is how come pedro cortez hasn’t decertifyied our Electronic Voting Machines that violate our STATE CONSTITUTION and count votes in SECRETE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hey Pedro, get on the right side of the FIGHT!
Yours truely,
from Westmoreland County
The powerful are setting their sights on Obama, saying he is talking. The ones saying it are saying that by talking.
They go on to say he should not be talking about what he is talking about, but talking about how wonderful Iraq will be after 100 more years of war there.
And one of them had the straight TALK express. Can you feel the hypocrisy already?
I smell a rat!!Sounds like Ohio again when George
Bush had help to win over Gore&Kerry.Didn’t Bill
Clinton have his office in Harlem?Charlie Rangel
is a Hillary supporter.When will people see that
the Clintons and Bushes are of the same mold.Our
Govenor is supporting Hillary so it won’t surprise
me at all if she wins by a landslide.We need change from the Clintons and Bushes but people tend to stay with the familiar.I’m for Obama!
Interesting that so far in the NY reports, the reported errors have all gone against Obama (at least as far as I’ve seen). Obama gets 0 in a number of precincts where he would be expected to do well, based on voter demographics. If that’s the case, that’s highly unlikely to be due to human error. A “Human error” explanation would require that there be approximately the same number of precincts with the errors going against Clinton.
As for Markos, it seems that once the main stream media reports on a problem, he’ll believe there’s a problem, but if bloggers (who document problems) do it, he’ll say it’s a conspiracy theory. Sounds like Markos wants to move out of blogging and into a salaried job with the MSM.
I voted for Obama and I voted in the 94th. where incidentally new computerized voter rolls “lost” the registrations of several of my neighbors who have lived and voted at the same address for 30 years. so much for zero votes for obama. this sucks.
Ah yes, ye olde one-armed-bandit voting machines. Here’s how those machines are rigged. The votes are counted on cogged wheels. What you do is remove a wheel and file down the cogs for the candidate you want to lose. Ideally you want to file off only every other tooth, so that half the votes for the candidate you want to lose get discarded. But if you have a lot of machines to rig and not much time to do it between the time that the machines are set up for the election and the time that the machines are presented for inspection and then placed into use, it’s very possible to be sloppy enough with the file so that no votes are counted for a candidate.
Incidentally, whenever this is discovered, the voting commissioner invariably says “they’re old machines, the gears must have just worn out.” As long as they’re careful to hide their filemarks with a coating of dirt and grease, it’s hard to detect that they actually rigged the machines as vs. the machine simply being worn out, even when it’s this blatant.