Everything worked as "planned..."

[RaulVB]

No, the more I read the more I undertand that this is not a democracy. America was one, time ago...

Link and excerpt below:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/21/101633/05

"A review of election results in a 10-county sampling revealed more than 12,000 ballots that failed to record a vote for president, almost one in every 10 ballots cast. The unofficial audit by Scripps Howard News Service uncovered malfunctioning voting machines, improperly designed ballots and poor accounting procedures around the nation.
The review of certified election returns led authorities to restore 662 votes for president in Louisiana and West Virginia that had been miscounted in easily detectable errors made by local officials.

But most of the ballots discovered missing in the study will remain lost.

"I'm so upset over this that I can't sleep," said Sandy Campbell, clerk of Pike County, Ark., upon learning that a damaged optical scanning machine permanently lost nearly 700 votes. "We had no idea this had happened. But I'll know what to look for in the future. We'll try never to let this happen again."
The study - part of a yearlong project examining errors in America's election practices - checked the accuracy of the Nov. 2 election by comparing official results for president against the reported number of ballots cast in more than 2,400 counties nationwide.
Ten counties with some of the nation's worst voting record discrepancies were selected in the project. Local election officials were asked why their vote tallies didn't match their ballot counts.

All but one county official admitted they did not make this important crosscheck before reporting results that, most now concede, contained significant errors. State officials also failed to notice the discrepancies.

<...>

"We're so glad we found this. I don't know how it happened. Thank you so much for calling us," said Registrar of Voters Bettye Moore in Madison Parish, La., after finding errors that misplaced 419 votes for Democrat John Kerry and 15 lost votes for President Bush.

<...>

"I can't believe I did this!" said Jackson County Clerk Sarah Benter upon discovering a 1,664-vote error in her ballot count. "I'm going to have to get with our state Election Division to get this fixed."

<..>

Other problems uncovered in this study found much larger numbers of miscounted votes that cannot be corrected or recovered. The largest discrepancy occurred in Carteret County, N.C., where a programming error in a 10-year-old touch-screen voting machine erased 4,439 ballots.

"It was the most elementary error," said Edward Pond, chairman of the Carteret County Elections Board. "The machine was set so that it had a vote capacity of only 3,005 votes. If I hadn't been there watching the tally, I don't know when we would have noticed this."

Pond said his board plans to "send a letter of apology to each of these voters" and to invite them to a new election Jan. 11 to vote for North Carolina's agriculture commissioner, which is still undecided because of the error.

<...>

Voting machines again came under suspicion in two Arkansas counties where optical scanners apparently falsely reported that hundreds of voters selected two or more presidential candidates, a disqualifying error called "overvoting."

"Basically, we had a mechanical failure," said Pike County Clerk Campbell. The scanner disqualified 692 of the county's 4,083 voters - more than one in six voters. The machine also disqualified 433 votes in the U.S. Senate race for the same reason.

<...>

Officials in two of the 10 counties selected in this study refused to review ballots or check for missing votes.

"I don't have time to go through all of this, although it does sound like it ought to be gotten to the bottom of," said County Clerk John Jones of Worth County, Mo.

Only 1,132 of his 1,326 ballots registered a presidential vote, which means nearly 15 percent of Worth County voters appear to have ignored the presidential race. "Sir, I cannot record votes for president that are not there," Jones said later.

Only 2,063 of the 2,283 ballots cast in Adams County, Idaho, registered a vote for president. Officially, only 90 percent of the voters in this rural county had an opinion in the presidential race.

"If you can convince the secretary of state of Idaho to order a recount and to reimburse my county for it, then we'll do a recount. But I'm not going to do it," said Adams County Clerk Michael Fisk. "All of that stuff has been put away. What difference does it make? The election is over."

Fisk said Scripps Howard's request that he review he election tallies angered him.

"You are not going to assert that any votes are missing in Adams County. I'm not going to listen to that stuff. Goodbye," With that, Fisk hung up the telephone.