Of Course Nothing Like This Could Have Happened in Ohio
BROOKVILLE, Ind. - A hand recount of ballots cast using optical scanning technology gave a Democrat enough extra votes to bump a Republican from victory in a county commissioner's race.
The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana's Franklin County.
The recount Thursday pushed Democrat Carroll Lanning from fifth to third in the three-seat commissioners race, while Republican Roy Hall fell to fifth.
Democrats had suspected a glitch after preliminary election results included a Libertarian congressional candidate winning 7.7 percent of the vote in Franklin County, more than four times better than he did across the entire district.
Fidlar workers said no programming problems were found in the Accuvote 2000 ES system, but said the Rock Island, Ill.-based company is going over its programming elsewhere in the state and in Wisconsin and Michigan, which, like Indiana, have straight-party voting.
Fidlar national sales manager Bill Barrett on Friday called the glitch an "isolated incident" and said no other election results were in question.
A spokeswoman for the Indiana secretary of state's office said state officials were waiting to learn more from the company and Franklin County. Pre-election tests had found no problems, Kate Shepherd said, and the state was unaware of other similar troubles.
posted by Ron Chusid at 10:17 AM
2 Comments:
Obviously the Republicans (or this one at least) don't care about the integrity of election results. This should be something which both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
You are welcome to post thier address for contributions here, and I wish them luck, but I think that this is really a dead end effort. A recount by itself won't change anything. If there were problems, legal challenges will most likely be required with regards to which disputed votes are counted.
I think our only hope is if the Kerry campaign gets involved as they have the funds for both the recount and legal efforts. My guess is that they are monitoring the situation to see if there is sufficient evidence that such action has a reasonable chance of changing the results. Of couse they might tip toe in with statments that they are just making sure that all the votes are counted.
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