New House speaker may not seat certified winner in disputed race

[DoYouEverWonder]

Dec 23, 2006

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) -- Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is considering not sitting the certified Republican winner of a contested congressional election when Congress reconvenes next month, her spokesman said.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, said the congresswoman has not yet decided what to do about the contested District 13 race where Republican Vern Buchanan was certified the winner by the state by a margin of 369 votes over Democrat Christine Jennings.

"The bottom line here is that nothing's off the table," Hammill said.

The House is currently investigating, and Jennings has pressed on with a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the touch-screen voting machines that she insists malfunctioned during the election.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FL_CONGRESS_DISTRICT_13_FLOL-?SITE=FLPET&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=state.shtml


Looks like we just got some more fireworks for the January celebrations.

[jamesinca]

1. good for Madame Speaker

bring this voting machine issue up in a big way.

[PerceptionManagement]

5. Boy, is'nt this going to piss off the repugs..Say, who was that Cali girl

that got screwed the same way? Oh, yea.. that's it! Bilbray/Busby and the DEM got screwed again! Fuck the repugs. Fraud is not an election strategy but it's seems to be embraced by SCOTUS.

Fuck you big tony.


hey Eds, bit me with the language. Grown-ups curse.

[rosesaylavee]

34. My first thoughts too.

Denny swore the RW idjit in BEFORE California certified that election. Turn around is fair play. If thems the rules, Pelosi can play by them too.

[liberaldemocrat7]

35. Speaker Pelosi should refuse to seat Bilbray too.

Did the November election get stolen too?

[rosesaylavee]

38. The Bilbray/Busby thing happened last spring.

Stolen? I am sure it was. But Hastert already swore the wrong one in. California had no say in it by then.

[xchrom]

2. this may bring more heat to the issue of voting machines,

this may be the ticket for a very interesting ride.

[CJCRANE]

3. Seems to be

that these machines always malfunction in the Republicans favor...

[pokercat999]

4. Exactly this is the perfect place to start the electronic

vote machine fraud investigation. Don't seat this member-elect until we are sure he was actually elected. Let the investigation go where it may, including the last two presidential elections.

[rock]

8. Which is only fair

You'll recall that in election 2000, the CONservatives claimed the chads had liberal biased. (Yeah, sarcasm.)

[POAS]

6. The repukes will

run to the SCOTUS again!

ES&S,Diebold and the rest will claim that the software is protected intellectual property and cannot be scrutinized without doing them harm. For God's sake, it is just, at its core, an addition algorithm with, probably, some bad coding thrown in. We could let elementary school children count paper ballots and get a better result then these corporations are giving us.

Maybe those clowns that showed up in Florida in 2000 beating on the counting room door will have a reunion outside Nancy's office door in January.

[richabk]

16. Intellectual Property????

Exactly! How can "push button & add 1" be a corporate secret????

[POAS]

23. They have been

claiming all along that the software is a proprietary secret and won't let anybody see it.

A preposterous arguement on its face.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

33. Copyright Nazis. I hate Copyright Nazis.

[jmowreader]

44. Well, it's the OTHER parts they don't want you to see...

like when you turn the machine on and it asks you to enter a
number between 10 and 50, which it uses to decide how many
Democratic votes to allow through before it credits one to the
Republican candidate...or the special routine where it
precounts the race at 5:30pm and, if the Republican is losing,
it starts calling Old Republicans' Homes asking the staff to
put anyone who's not currently in a coma on a bus and get them
to a polling station...or the fact that the guy who built the
fucking thing in the first place was elected to the Senate
from Nebraska on it. (The last one's true.)

[hootinholler]

18. Let them!

The constitution is clear. The house certifies its members before they are seated.

-Hoot

[Hardrada]

29. I hope they do. Have a trapdoor down to Hades put right there!

[bullimiami]

7. my thoughts exactly too. election scams will not be tolerated. fix it or forget it.

[valerief]

9. Fancy Nancy makes me dancy and prancy. nt

[Zorra]

10. It's time to stop allowing republicans to steal elections. Good

for Nancy Pelosi, this is the right thing to do.

[flyarm]

11. couldn't congress demand to have their own experts see the software??

could congress not demand to hire their own experts ( computer software experts ) to go down to fla and demad to look at the software of ES&S..and over ride the proprietary rights..and say they will not seat anyone in that district ..until they ( congress) themselves see the results of the software or the testing/auditing of the software itself?

although fla 13 is the most glaring nationwide..it is not the only case of software manipulation..it happened here in NJ and no one in the Supervisors of elections offices can explain why or how 75 votes in one town ended up on another towns election tallies 35 miles away!

this could finally open Pandora's box..if congress themselves decided to do their own audit/testing of the software..

i guess my question is..could congress override the proprietary restrictions and do their own testing of the machines..and for once and for all..prove the machine software has been manipulated..to throw elections??

and for congress to do it before the Supremes were to get involved?

fly

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. At the least, we will finally be able to have

a Congressional investigation into the matter and I'm sure what will come out will be appalling.

[IndianaGreen]

13. The 18,000 undervote on those touch screen machines are reason

enough to call for a special election. Let the voters decide who is elected, not the software!

[jmowreader]

37. Was it 18,000...or 18,181?

I remember a few elections back that in three different places, the spread between the losing Democrat and the winning Republican was exactly 18,181 votes. IIRC, Andy Stephenson was the first to point this out.

[BrotherBuzz]

40. Three races in one county, five in the nation back in 2002

DANNY SCHEEL (Texas): 18,181 votes (Comol County)
CARTER CASTEEL (Texas): 18,181 votes (Comol Country)
JEFF WENTWORTH (Texas): 18,181 votes (Comol County)
CANDICE MILLER (Michigan): 18,181 Votes (Lapeer County)
MICHAEL SMIGIEL (Maryland): 18,181 Votes (St. Anne's)
All five won and all five Republicans.

I suspect a hot computer programmer could shed some light on why how 18181 was a default number.

[jmowreader]

42. It gives a nice binary pattern

You can represent any of sixteen numbers with four bits in a register:

0 = 0000
1 = 0001
2 = 0010
3 = 0011
4 = 0100
5 = 0101
6 = 0110
7 = 0111
8 = 1000
9 = 1001
A = 1010 (A through F represent "10" through "15" using only one digit position)
B = 1011
C = 1100
D = 1101
E = 1110
F = 1111

Therefore...18181 in binary is 0001 1000 0001 1000 0001 . You can get there by starting the machine with one "misset" bit in each of the five registers needed to handle a precinct with less than 100,000 voters.

In the old, old, old days when we built machines the size of dorm-room refrigerators, ran them from 50-amp power supplies, and wire-wrapped everything together with eight-line ribbon cable, the places you were most likely to see errors were on the most significant bit (aka the MSB) and the least significant bit (aka the LSB) because they were on the edge of the cables and picked up more electrical noise. Look at the placement of those misset bits--the ones are all on the LSB wire, and the eights are all on the MSB wire.

Next question, and this is very important: when was the last time you ever heard of a computer being wired together with eight-line ribbon cable? You don't, at least not the way this would have required. They've all got printed circuit boards in them--which are nearly immune to this kind of error.

I'd kinda like to see someone disassemble the startup routine on the tabulators--to see if, just maybe, the (R) registers do things they shouldn't do, like start up with bits set high.

[BrotherBuzz]

43. Good attempt at explaining in for the laymen

Should this computer Luddite, who's just beginning to master speilcheck, assume 18181 popping up to be nothing but one BIG red flag? Is it an indication of attempted reverse engineering gone awry with, say, one 'missit' or transposed entry?

[Freddie Stubbs]

41. 18,412 undervotes to be exact:

Vern Buchanan . . . . . . . . . 58,632

Christine Jennings . . . . . . . 65,487

Over Votes . . . . . . . . . 1

Under Votes . . . . . . . . . 18,412

http://www.srqelections.com/results/gen2006sum.htm

[Mz Pip]

14. What would be so hard about

having a new election with paper ballots. It's got to be cheaper than the endless court cases.

18,000 votes is way beyond any reasonable number of blank votes.

Mz Pip
:dem:

[all.of.me]

15. Excellent!

[hootinholler]

17. Turn-about is fair play!

If the republic congress could seat the guy from Caliornia before he was certified (the Busby race) she can certainly withhold seating this 'winner'.

-Hoot

[PSPS]

19. "nothing's off the table" my ass

Let's see if I get this straight.

A single house member's district's election validity is in doubt, so Pelosi says, "nothing's off the table."

Bush commits crimes against humanity, tortures, uses illegal weapons against civilians, engages in illegal spying on citizens, illegally invades a country, kills almost a million of its citizens as well as 3,000 of our own troops, causes tens of thousands of life-destroying injuries to US troops, and on and on, but Pelosi says "impeachment is off the table."

Excuse me, but I think Pelosi is one fucked up person.

[DoYouEverWonder]

20. It would have been very inappropriate

for the person who was going to be 3rd in line for the presidency to make impeachment a campaign issue. Just because it's not on Nancy's table, doesn't mean it's not roasting in someone else's oven still.

[rdmccur]

25. Hopefully

Nancy is just playing poker.

[Infinite Hope]

21. Thank goodness. n/t

[Eurobabe]

22. Hot Damn, go NANCY!!

[tomhayes]

24. How can she does this in a LEGAl sense?

I don't think the race in Florida was fair and i do think the voting machines either malfunctioned or were tampered with, but how does Pelosi *legally* not seat the person?
Is it part of the U.S. Constitution Article 1 section 5?

[Contrite]

30. I guess the same way Hastert seated Bilbray

even though the election was not yet really over (certified). He seated an uncertified "winner" though the election was in doubt; can she not refuse to seat a "certified" winner when the election is in doubt?

[eridani]

26. Methinks she needs to hear from everybody concerned about this

Just in case stuff slips off the table.

http://www.house.gov/pelosi/contact/contact.html


District Office
450 Golden Gate Ave. 14th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
[phone]

Washington, D.C. Office
2371 Rayburn HOB
Washington, DC 20515
[phone]

[Kolesar]

31. The Honorable Representative Nancy Pelosi

Is that how to write the salutation?

[eridani]

39. Yep. Go for it . n/t

[Imagevision]

27. UPDATE: Pelosi prefers the state court to settle election outcome for Jennings

Although congress has the power to order another election, we'll see how much the Dems stick together compared to the repukes!

[Dogmudgeon]

28. Good!

The SCOTUS will certainly override her -- and once again, establish itself as an injudicious, partial, biased body of hacks and political appointees.

Mme. Pelosi and the rest of the leadership of the "Democrat party" (sic) should take every opportunity they can to force the 'Publicans into acts of publically craven behavior.

It's long past due.

--p!

[bearfan454]

32. Damn right !

18,000 missing or under votes is bullshit.

[lonestarnot]

36. Flordee you better get to the fixin! And I don't mean the machines! Throw them in the Atlantic and

fix your system of voting! NOW!