X post- NM 1 problems

[FogerRox]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=2958351

[Awsi Dooger]

1. Here's the problem: Patricia Madrid blew the debate

She was heading toward a reasonably comfortable win then froze when asked a candidate-to-candidate question regarding taxes in the lone debate. Wilson used the footage in devastating commercials and there is plenty of evidence it was the tipping factor. A local poll was done, I think by a university, indicating that debate performance caused plenty of doubt among independents and soft Republicans, and they shifted back to Wilson, the safe choice incumbent.

I thought New Mexico went back to hand counted paper ballots this year and we were thrilled, the ultimate cure all.

[FogerRox]

2. Counting the ballots is sort of mandated by law, a point you might have missed

FROM TERRY RILEY:


I worked on Monday opening absentee ballots at the Bernalillo County election warehouse. I worked on Wednesday counting absentee ballots. After about two hours of work our table of four noticed that we had a tally sheet that had two votes for each ballot position and only one ballot had been counted.

On Wednesday morning the tally packs consisted of groups of ballots that had already been tallied, tally sheets and ballots that had not been counted yet. Our procedure was to spread out a tally packet into a stack of already counted ballots, the tally sheets and the ballots to be counted. The pre-counted ballots had a sticky-note with the number of ballots counted, the date they were counted and signatures of the ballot reader and the tally marker. We checked to see that the number of ballots equaled what the sticky-note indicated. We then added a tally of the ballots that had not yet been counted.

We were on our fourth packet and we noticed that there was only one ballot yet there were two vote tallies on the tally sheet. We then rechecked the packets that we had already processed and found that every one of them had votes marked and not enough ballots to support them.

[philb]

3. How many votes would be affected in what you compiled?

What do you think was going on? what caused this?
Who was it reported to? Did it get corrected?

Is it likely it was occurring elsewhere?

[philb]

4. Are voters that gullible? One question in a debate should not be a major factor

unless it implied corruption or something serious.
Who won the debate overall?
Who was the greenest?
Who has the most special interest connections?
One would expect the encumbent to know some details that a challenger would not, but that has little to do with who would be the best choice.

Something similar happened in the Florida Gov. race,
the Repub ran one negative ad millions of times and the Dem candidate never effectively countered it; even though
there was a very effective counter that could have been used.
Use of a misleading ad continuously that had nothing to do with real issues should have had the opposite effect, if countered; but it wasn't.

[eridani]

5. It's the CHECKS AND BALANCES, people!

Handcounting without checks and balances is as bad as any other system without checks and balances.