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Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Why am I not surprised?
Posted by Jill | 3:29 PM

Looks like the Republicans are fixin' to rig the Tim Kaine/Jerry Kilgore race for the governorship of Virginia.

This has been a particularly ugly contest, with Kaine going into today with a five-point lead -- and the Repugs are not going to go quietly:

Election day voting is going on across the Old Dominion, but everything has not gone smoothly in Roanoke County.

News 7 has received calls from several voters in at least four different precincts who say their votes for Tim Kaine were not recorded or took several attempts to go through.

They contend the electronic touch screens repeatedly indicated they were voting for Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore instead of registering their intended vote for his Democratic opponent Tim Kaine.

Roanoke Co. Registrar Judy Stokes says she doesn't want to say the problem is operator error on the part of the voters, but she points out the touch screens are sensitive. She says anyone who is having difficulty voting should ask one of the poll workers for assistance.

State election officials have been told of the problem. They believe if there is a problem, it could have been caused by the way the machines were stored.

The Kaine compaign is reportedly watching the situation in Roanoke County.


Funny, isn't it, how EVERY time touch-screen voting machines are used, and they record the vote wrong, it's ALWAYS an intended Democratic vote stored as a Republican vote? Every. Goddamn. Time.

I have NO faith in the electoral system in this country. Republican campaign contributors own the voting machinery, there is NO transparency, and we have NO assurance that our vote is counted properly if it is counted at all.

Democracy, my ass.

UPDATE: Shenanigans in -- where else? -- Ohio, too:

Voting so far on new touch-screen machines has not been quite as seamless as local board of elections officials had hoped.

Lucas County Board of Elections director Jill Kelly said some voters left the precincts this morning without voting because the machines were not up and running. She urged people who had problems to return and cast their ballots.

“The places where there were problems have been resolved,” she said. “It really wasn’t a technology problem, it was a people problem.”

Ms. Kelly said that several of the county’s 2,000 trained poll workers had to be talked through some problems during the morning.

Poll workers at the Sylvania Senior Center could not find the machine’s memory cards and at the Toledo Board of Education building the voting machines could not be found. Those issues were resolved, Ms. Kelly said. And those coming to vote where machines were not yet up and running were given provisional ballots.

She denied reports that voters in some precincts were given the wrong ballot issues to consider. She added that as of about 9 a.m., the calls from the 495 precincts died down significantly.

Wood County residents in some precincts arrived at 6:30 a.m. only to find that the machines were not yet up and running, said elections director Terry Burton. But all precincts had at least one machine up by 6:40 a.m. and all machines in the majority of the county were available for voters by about 7:30 a.m., he said.

Mr. Burton said the problems were attributable to human error rather than to malfunctions in the machines.

“It was really a confidence issue,” he said of the poll workers. “After calming them down and walking them through the steps, we were able to get the machines up and working.”


Translation: After we got the new memory cards designed to change every "n"th vote from Democratic to Republican, we were able to get them up and running.

The voting system is broken, folks. What on earth do we have to do to get this issue on the front page?
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