WTF?! 200,000 votes?!
Of course, this is just one of the reasons why we always encourage candidates to not concede on Election Night…
Still, the difference in the results from Nov. 2 and in the returns formally certified by the board on Wednesday seems striking: The board found 195,055 votes, or 17 percent more votes, than were originally reported.
That differential – which nearly equals the total vote for governor in the Bronx and Staten Island combined – does not include an additional 28,442 affidavit ballots that New Yorkers cast at the polls on Election Day because of missing registrations or other reasons and another 30,665 absentee and military ballots and scattered write-in votes.
“Unbelievable,” said Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, in response to the significant number of votes cast last month that were not discovered until this week.
The preliminary machine tally alone swelled from 1,145,826 on election night to 1,366,881 in the official version.
The largest cache of newly found machine ballots was in Queens – about 80,000, or 31 percent more than were reported on election night.
…
The board had come under heavy criticism during this year’s campaign for its management of a new computerized voting system that replaced the antiquated lever machines.
The primary vote in September was marred by problems, including polling sites that opened hours late, workers who lacked training in the new machines and machines that failed to function properly.
While the discrepancy between the number of votes counted on election night and those that were ultimately certified is noteworthy, it was not large enough to reverse the results in any election.
…
“The unofficial election night returns reported by the press always have huge discrepancies – which is why neither the candidates or the election officials ever rely on them,” said Douglas A. Kellner, co-chairman of the State Board of Elections.
It seems a bit disingenuous to say “the candidates”, at least, never “rely on” the unofficial Election Night returns. Most of them clearly do, as they both concede and declare victory that night in most cases. Certainly the media relies on those numbers and, in the event that there are questions about those unofficial, media-trumpeted results in the following days, it’s clear that whoever was named “the winner” on Election Night will be at a distinct advantage in any contests thereafter and whoever was declared as “the loser” that night will be accused of having “stolen” the election if the official results are different from those on Election Night (just ask Al Franken or Al Gore about that.)
Still, while official numbers always change during the canvass period following Election Day, it’s unclear from the NYT report how the Board of Elections accounts for that many previously uncounted/unnoticed votes on Election Night. 200,000? Really???
If I’m able to learn more, of course, I’ll let you know.
[Hat-tip to Joyce McCloy’s Voting News!]
FTA:
The use of the words “new” and “antiquated” are troubling. They imply that the computerized voting system is somehow superior to the older “lever machines.”
One suspects that the use of these two words reflects ignorance on the part of Sam Roberts of The New York Times of a fundamental problem with computerized voting systems: (1) There is no way to know whether a 100% unverifiable DRE counted so much as a single vote or whether the result was pre-programmed; (2) the only way to know whether votes have been accurately counted by an optical scan system is to hand count the paper ballots.
One can’t help but wonder whether NYC ever had experienced 200,000 missing votes for a month after an election that was conducted on its “antiquated” levers?
Ignorance is certainly one possible explanation for the reportage of Sam Roberts.
Yes, WTF. Sheesh.
Other candidates who conceded in NY must be kicking themselves in the butt right about now..
the new mantra to take America into the 21st. Century ,”While the discrepancy between the number of votes counted on election night and those that were ultimately certified is noteworthy,it was not large enough to reverse the results in any election.” LOL.
Is counting by human really that hard ?
Forth graders could count accurately our votes by hand.
It can be proven.
Shhh!
I guess that would be accurately count. But I’m old, darn it!
Proofreading is especially important when you can’t turn back.
My face is red, but my point is true. Forth graders could count our votes accurately with no problem if two groups were assigned to the task and had to keep counting until both results matched. They would be happy to do it and we would all be richer for it.
Diebold? Forget it!
Ernest A. Canning said on 12/2/2010 @ 5:50 pm PT…
One can’t help but wonder whether NYC ever had experienced 200,000 missing votes for a month after an election that was conducted on its “antiquated” levers?
Well, that’s all you can do — wonder — because unrecorded votes evaporate into the ether on a lever machine. And there were unrecorded votes.
One story that made the rounds in Connecticut about a lever machine ballot position that election after election, always seemed to produce losers. Eventually reportedly a cog or gear of some sort was discovered to have been filed such that in election after election, apparently not all votes cast for that particular ballot position were recorded successfully.
Votes –not ballots — could be “lost” on a regular basis, because an undervote is not a red flag in and of itself. There was no way to “find” those lost votes, especially in the races farther down the ticket.
If changing out or modifying a particular part conceivable could change the results, and the repair/maintenance process was not understood or viewed as important enough to regulate or oversee, then was there the potential for any voting machine mechanic who served an entire city to impact statewide elections in a small state? What was the potential to mechanically modify elections locally without a fancy degree in computer programming? In larger cities, could the elections result trends described as ” X party tends to win in the cities, Y party in the rural areas” ever have been related to who was maintaining the machines vs. how many votes that maintainer could influence if incompetent or dishonest?
Actually, after saying all that, let’s look at another area. In some states, while the machines may be new, the means of aggregating the votes may be old. In Connecticut they are aggregated by unregulated, unexamined computers using Excel spreadsheets. If the registrars are not computer savvy about voting machines, why should they be computer savvy about a far more sophisticated computer using an Excel spreadsheet that theoretically could be programmed by the end user to produce particular results using formulas, and the formulas erased before saving the spreadsheet? What is the result “chain of custody” that ensures the original district/precinct results are correctly represented the whole way into the statewide total?
Food for thought for all election geeks.
And watch, all the ballots were from predominately poor and ethnic neighborhoods that likely vote democrat?
Folks — get a grip here. The new system in New York City is not FULLY computerized. 100% of the votes are cast on PAPER BALLOTS. Yes, those ballots are scanned and tallied by computers, but the only way the board can, a month after the election, manage to find 199,055 more votes (or ballots) than originally reported is because there’s some MASSIVE INCOMPETENCE or possibly FRAUD going on.
Brad – Here’s a good summary of the Bridgeport clusterfuck in the Conn. gubernatorial race.
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Bridgeport-vote-recount-shows-widespread-876032.php#page-1
“Bridgeport was different. Hand-counted ballots represented 1 in 4 votes cast. And the circumstances in which they were counted — by poll workers following a 15- to 17-hour work day, between midnight and Wednesday morning’s sunrise — were far from conducive to accuracy. What’s more, election experts assert, the inclusion of hand counting immediately increases the prospect for error.”