MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD IN FL-13, Jennings (D) behind 368 votes, 18,000 votes "lost" in DIEBOLD

[Herman Munster]

http://heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage

Christine Jennings spent most of Wednesday out of sight from the public, meeting about the vote in the 13 district Congressional race, but she emerged for a brief appearance around 3 p.m. with a message: “We will not rest until every vote is counted.”

Jenning said the potential “undervote” of more than 18,000 votes is a “staggering number” and expressed perhaps her sharpest concern yet on the results.

“Sarasota voters have been victimized by not having their vote count,” she said.

Jennings said her campaign has been filing reports of voting irregularities since the early voting process. The calls and e-mails continued on Wednesday, she said.

“The phones have been ringing off the hook,” said Jennings, who did not take questions and did not elaborate on the kinds of reports callers were making.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/8/16821/7943

I was a pollworker for this race. What happened was that every so often the ballot would drop Jennings'name from at the review pages. Which means that people pressed her name on their ballot but by the time the reiview page came up (15 pages later) her name had been dropped and it would show no vote for that race. I helped a lot of people revote for Jennings but in my precinct alone we had 33 undervotes. Why was this happening? I would love to know.

[Ignacio Upton]

1. Cruella may have lost last night

But her horrid legacy lives on!

[Jane Austin]

2. That's NOT Voter Fraud. That's Election Fraud.

But Republicans would like to plant the idea in youir head that <i>voters</i> are the problem in elections, so we need more restrictive rules enforced.

[Morgana LaFey]

9. More restrictive rules that amount to

more voter suppression or can amount to more voter suppression thru overly zealous enforcement (think of some of what we've seen with various voter purges).

[ThomCat]

10. Excellent point.

Changing the language displaces the blame.

[pat_k]

18. This point is Critical!! Corruption or Election Fraud (for deliberate corruption) . .

. . not "voter fraud" (and most definitely not "shenanigans" or other terms that hide the gravity).

"Voter fraud" is the non-problem fascists claim to be solving when they suppress votes by requiring IDs that countless voters don't have, don't need, and can't afford or by purging registration roles of eligible voters to as they seek to identify and eliminate invalid registrations (that aren't much of a problem in the first place).

The so-called "voter fraud problem" is a myth. Really. Despite their http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20061011/1a_lede11.art.htm">best efforts they just can't find the "problem" of voters showing up and trying to cast illegal ballots. (As with all myths, they always cite the same 5 or 6 unverified or debunked anecdotes as "proof.")

Corruption of our elections, whether intentional (election fraud) or not is another matter entirely.

Election fraud is an insider's game that is thwarted by easily understood processes at every phase that are open to scrutiny by the stakeholders (and that means us, the voters, not just the parties). And every phase means every phase, from registering and ensuring equal access to cast a countable ballot to securing, counting, and verifying.

Corruption is prevented by requiring checks to uncover errors and putting backup and parallel processes in place to ensure you can recover from errors.

Words are important. It is corruption, pure simple. We must reject euphemistic words like "glitches" or "shenanigans." This is not a game. A word like "shenanigans" cannot begin to capture the damage done by the intolerable problems that corrupt our elections and make it impossible for us to believe the results.

Believable elections. That's all we want. Is it really so much to ask?

[SharonAnn]

22. Absolutely! Framing should be "Election Fraud", not "Voter Fraud".

[leftchick]

3. kick

:grr:

[Herman Munster]

4. this needs to be a national story

it's outrageous this happened in Harris' district.

[leftchick]

8. on CNN now as breaking story!

excellent! :)

[graywarrior]

5. I voted for Jennings, even tho I'm not crazy about her. However,

the woman has balls, I'll say that for her and she won't back off this.

[IndyOp]

6. Excellent Report - have you called Jennings staff to give your story?

Or call 1-866-SAV-VOTE -- hotline to report voting machine problems.

:kick:

[graywarrior]

7. Anyone have the exit poll numbers from Sarasota/Bradenton?

[BeFree]

11. Not exit, but pre-election poll

      Early poll   Latest     Projected   
        Dem GOP    Dem GOP    Dem    GOP      
FL 13    49  47    49   47    51.4  48.6     

[graywarrior]

14. Thanks

[adamuu]

12. wow. we need this to be on the front page, too

I found this when i followed your link, too

Reports of Dist. 13 voting problems continue to surface
SNN News 6's Charles Brown talks to some Sarasota County voters who say they encountered problems at the polls.
http://heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061108/VIDEO/61108029

The interviews at the beginning are telling
The part about the clipboard hitting the car was stupid, though...its about half the video... and doesn't have much to do with this.

[adamuu]

13. this video is even better

18 THOUSAND of voters left only that race blank (undervotes)? Election Supervisor Kathy Dent trying to explain it away.
Gimme a friggin break.
http://heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061108/VIDEO/61108028

[TexasLawyer]

15. kick

this sounds very messed up.

[Glenda]

16. *groan* I had contributed to her campain

then later thought "Florida! Why did I do that? THere will be election fraud."

Ugh!!

I hate being right in this case

:grr:

[tavalon]

17. Which voters committed fraud ?

Just a friendly reminder that we shouldn't be framing the problem as a voter fraud but as election fraud.

[In Truth We Trust]

19. K&R Hand Counted Paper Ballots NOW!

[Patsy Stone]

20. I've been watching this race

I hope Jennings gets all the help she needs. This was, btw, one of Brit and Citizen Joe's bellwether races. They both seemed happy to call this as a small victory.

Count the votes!

[Spangle]

24. Touch screen.. what's to recount?

And that's the point.

[Patsy Stone]

25. I know

but running through the process is a formality and it has to be done; and it could be all one machine and the others could be screwy in another way, and have more votes than tabultated. Who knows?

Also, in Florida you have to sign the register and now they give you a little piece of paper (a Voter Authorization Slip) as well. Did we find out if the Voter Authorization slips in the precincts match the book counts and how far they're off from the machine counts? Even though there's no VVPB, there's plenty of paper to start looking at. There are also absentee and provisionals, which are paper.

[LonelyLRLiberal]

31. Do voters register by party in Florida?

If so, could the Florida Democratic Party take a post-election poll of a sample of Democratic and Republican voters to see how many would say they did not vote in that race? There has to be a way to construct a sample that might show irregularities.

[Patsy Stone]

35. Yes

We register by party, and I suppose that a sample could be taken. I'd start with the percentage of Dems who turned out in the primary and voted for her and how that correlates to the General Election results. IOW, if she received 52% of the Democratic primary votes, but only 48% of the general votes, then either 4% of Dems showed up on Election Day to vote for the Republican or something is wiggy.

Some statistician wiser than I will have a more scientific plan to take a better sample, I'm sure, but somehow my pretzel logic makes sense to me.

:)

[LonelyLRLiberal]

36. With no paper trail of votes, seems something needs to be done

to attempt to investigate what voters actually intended to do on this race. This just reeks of fraud.

[Patsy Stone]

39. That's a fact

Although there is a way (a bad one) to do a "manual recount" on the machines. From this ABC News article (http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2642247):

"To do a manual recount for touch-screens, officials go back over the images of the electronic ballots where the machine didn't register a choice. But state rules essentially say that if the machine doesn't show that a voter chose a candidate, the voter is assumed to have meant to skip the race it would be tough to prove otherwise."

So of course the right way is to have a paper trail, but there is a small sliver of hope.

[Wiley50]

44. Actually, It's now ILLEGAL to RECOUNT votes tallied first by machine

Now, we know why JEB pushed this new NO RECOUNT LAW through.

As if we didn't have a pretty good idea already

[Beetwasher]

21. WE NOW HAVE THE POWER TO INVESTIGATE THIS BULLSHIT!!!!!!

For real!

[lonestarnot]

23. We have got to get rid of these fucking machines before 08!

[AIJ Alom]

26. Election is not done yet folks until every vote is counted. And

it appears that Florida 13th CD has quite a few left to count.

[The Backlash Cometh]

27. You hang in there, Christine!

We knew this problem would come up. We need to make a stand now.

[Vinca]

28. Jay Severin was on the Imus show this morning snickering

about how the voting machines mysteriously worked fine this time since the Democrats won. What an idiot. If anything, the publicity about the hackability of the machines reduced voter fraud, but it didn't go away.

[TwentyFive]

29. Buchanan = Defrauded Investors of millions

Buchanan spent $12 million of his OWN money on the race. He obtained that money by defrauding investors. Those investors sued....but...records are sealed from the public. Link to story:

http://www.dccc.org/news/Buchanan_primary/

If he spent $12 mil in advertising...how much would he pay to rig the election?

[d_b]

30. Something has to be done in that state.

What are the options with the House and Senate now being ours?

[greeneyedboy]

32. donate NOW to help the Florida Democratic Party keep up the fight

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2950989">they only need another $2k--just 40 people giving $50--to reach their goal

[greeneyedboy]

33. and here's what the Election Law Blog says: revote possible?

http://electionlawblog.org/archives/007175.html

[stop the bleeding]

34. we in Florida have been forgotten about since 2000

our systems are sooo flawed - oh I guess it will matter when people need our 27 electoral votes, shit by then it may be up to 30.

Florida was pretty resistant to the "Blue Wave" on Tuesday, not completely but Florida seemed more restitant to it.

I can not check spelling right now cause DU is running really slow for me - so sorry for any errors :D

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

38. Joe the Intern Killer was snickering about it too

On Tuesday night.......

[tom_paine]

37. K & R for busting their asses!

[Leopolds Ghost]

40. Bump n/t

[flpoljunkie]

41. Read this from Johns Hopkins Professor, Avi Rubin about the "recount" in the House race in Sarasota!

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

http://avi-rubin.blogspot.com

A Worst Case Scenario for a midterm election?

The DRE vendors like to pretend that they can perform recounts. They take the vote totals on the machines and print corresponding ballots, and then count them by hand. Let me give an analogy to demonstrate how silly that is. It would be comical if vendors weren't actually doing it and convincing people that they were performing a recount.

Imagine if you had a word document on your computer, and the document stated some fact. You were not sure if the fact was true. So, to verify the fact, you print the word document, and then you read it out loud and say, "Ah, if that's what it says, then it must be true because I'm looking at a printout." What the vendors are doing is printing out the questionable results and then counting them. Of course they are going to match what was on the machine, but they do not provide an independent count. The so-called recounts of DREs are really just print and count, not RE-count. It is a waste of time.

Now, we hear that in Sarasota County, there were 18,000 undervotes in the race for the 13th congressional seat. The race is expected to be decided by fewer than 400 votes. If paper ballots had been used, the huge number of undervotes could be investigated. Without them, there is no recourse - no way to figure out why this happened. I have several theories. Perhaps that many people just did not care about that race. Unlikely in my opinion. Most likely is that the human interface, that is, candidate placement on the ballot caused many people to miss that race. The next possibility is that a software glitch caused votes in that race not to be counted.Finally, it is possible that someone actually did something to cause this. The problem with paperless voting is that we'll never know, and there will never be any way to find out.

It is unbelievable that the control of the US senate is coming down to a close race that cannot be recounted, and for which there are no physical ballots. The vendors may come out with their "emperor's clothes" recounts, but the public should understand that these are not really recounts, they are just print and count./b]

Posted by Avi Rubin: at 4:09 PM

[marions ghost]

42. I am glad to see the Dems fighting

election theft for a change.

[Nimrod2005]

43. Very interesting, we really need to stay on top of this one!!!