Public Relations News, Features, and Analysis – PR Week — This is getting more interesting by the minute. Like it has made any difference. Read the entire interview. It is quite interesting.
PRWeek: Why do you think this wasn’t covered heavily by major media directly after the election?
Kennedy: I think the mainstream media took up the Republican echo chamber, and just echoed the right-wing talking points.PRWeek: Why didn’t the Democrats themselves pursue this?
Kennedy: Well, there was a lot of complaining; there were a lot of lawsuits. But it got very little traction in the media. But you know, the Democrats on this issue have been abysmal as well.PRWeek: Your story wasn’t based on any secret information, correct?
Kennedy: No, that’s the whole thing. This was not a secret conspiracy. This was done openly and shamelessly. Across Ohio, there were people who did everything they could to stop this.
Is this the one that smashed his car into a concrete barrier, DWI, DWB, and on Ambien and under congressional immunity, or is that another member of the Kennedy clan?
Wow, the one non-drunk in the family is crazy. Who’d a thunk it?
James Hill: That’s a really unkind thing to say about George W Bush.
RFK, an idiot from a long line of idiots…
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/06/kennedy_makes_t.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/index.html
http://www.motherjones.com/arts/books/2005/11/recounting_ohio-3.html
Anyone who ever has read one of my comments knows that I’m a Conservative.
I read an interesting story about the Diebold machines, that under the election law that was passed a couple years ago, Diebold got the exclusive contract to sell their machines to the various states who were trying to impliment the law about touch screen voting. If you (a county election chief) chose Diebold machines, then you got them free from the Feds, if you chose another company, you had to pay for them yourself. Diebold, at the time refused to equip the machines with a paper vote recorder with the free machines. (this is why no paper in Ohio), but since that time a number of county election heads have made vigorious complaints to the feds and now Diebold is including the paper trail part of the machines.
California bought their machines from another company and in the primary this year, most counties had them up and running with the new paper trail attachments. They are rather cool and having worked the primary as a precient inspector, I can say that a lot of the people who refused to use touchscreen in the last election, did use the new machines and were quite happy with them.
Ohio had problems, many of them, but the worst of them were in Democratic controlled counties, and were caused by local authorities not doing a good job of seeing to it they had what was needed to conduct the election. A massive conspirousy would have required the collusion of those Democrats to have happened. Bush won the state, the rest is history, but it did raise a lot of legimate concerns about the machines.
Personally I would like to see all paper ballots, hand marked and hand tallied. I could wait until the next day to learn who won for County Dog Catcher, especially if it meant a much more secure vote.
What happend with these paper receipts? If the voters walk off with them, you’ve just eliminated the secret ballot, and open up more vote-buying.
I’ll take a minute to disagree with folks here, Left or Right, that I often agree with. Why, after all, are we geeks? It’s because we all know that we can construct advanced machinery to do a better job than humans can at a lot of things.
One of those things is to count stuff. Like ballots.
Do you really trust human beings counting ballots more than trusting a machine? These are, after all, usually the parents of that dweeb who brought you a hamburger with mustard on it instead of the ketchup you ordered. These are — very often — someone picked for the job on the basis of their “reliability” as determined by local political hacks.
Didn’t you watch all those well-trained people trying to count votes in Floriduh?
Of course, you watch the watchers. Of course, you run random checks on how the software was set up for an election. But, when push comes to shove, I’ll take a decent cash register over Aunt Sally — or her little boy, Marvin — trying to calculate my change, any day.
Oh, and for the less-than-mentally-agile, include the paper receipts so you can look at it and make certain the machine “voted” the way you thought you did. The poll watchers can void your effort on the spot by verifying that receipt against a machine record — allowing an instant revote — if your laws are sufficiently advanced.
Though you rarely get that chance even with a spoiled paper ballot in most voting districts.
#25 joshua, a very effective form of “theft” can be accomplished without manipulating a single electron or paper ballot. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes, while black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes. You’ve got to REALLY want to vote to wait in line that long. I saw TV reports on election night showing precincts with wait times of well over 5 hours.
Why are you blaming the Democrats for not having enough voting machines in urban districts? Do you really think they didn’t try to get the machines they needed to reduce expected wait times to a reasonable level? Conduct of a fair election is the sacred (in a democracy) responsibility of the Secretary of State — oops, he was a Republican, and now he’s running for governor in Ohio. No doubt, he’s built up a little political capital with his party after his misallocation of the limited supply of voting machines in 2004.
Gary, the elections are run at the county and precinct level too. They get to choose how many voting machines they want and where to put them.
Here’s a link to Mother Jones’ partial debunking.
http://www.markhertsgaard.com/Articles/2005/RecountingOhio/
Sounds like he’s going out of his way to downplay things. I’ve never heard of unknown women getting a 10% boost in votes just for being women.
#26 AB CD…..the paper part is a black box, with a glass screen attached to the side of the touchscreen voting machines. It has a power source and a computor type connector that allows the votes on the touch screen to be printed on a scroll of paper. You the voter can watch each vote you cast being printed as you cast it. If you make an error you go through the regular error procedure and the error vote is then voided and the new vote printed under it. No one else can see what you vote or what the printer says without literally joining you at the screen. When you have finished the ballot, the touch screen has you verify that you are done 3 times. Then the voting card you inserted into the touch screen to begin the voting process is ejected, and then the paper scroll advances upwards, so that the view window is now blank and can recieve the next voter. There is no paper *reciept* for the voter. The scroll is locked and sealed in the *verivote* machine and can only be removed by the offical vote counters at the polling headquarters. It is only used if there is any type of discrepancy with the touch screen machine total. It must be kept for 1 or 2 years after that particular election. And additionally, each *verivote* machine has a serial number that must be checked 4 times by the Priecinct Inspector and another poll worker to match the machine it is attached to. If the verivote breaks down or jams or runs out of paper, then a field inspector must come and remove the verivote machine and replace it with a working or paper full one. The same 4 time serial number check must be done to match up the new machine with the touch screen. It seems to have a lot of checks and balances to keep it all up and up.
I just know that about 65 of my usual voters that refused to use the touch screens prior to the verivote being added all loved it and happily voted touch screen.
#27 eideard…..I have a schizoid thing going over this. I really like the touch screen machines and especially since they added the verivote feature. But this little something keeps flickering inside my head that says, that ANY computor type program can be made to do wondorous things by the person or persons who wrote the program or installed it. I keep smacking myself for being so cynical about this, but geeks and nerds can be crooks and vote stealers to.
So, I keep going back to a kind of voting that, as far as I know dosen’t exist anymore in the U.S…..paper ballots that you mark an *X* in the box next to candidate’s name, then you fold it, take the reciept off the corner and deposit it into a sealed and secure box. That box is then taken, under guard if needed to the county polling headquarters and people count them, by hand, not by electronic scanner or run through a mail sorter. Time consuming you bet. If you have a ballot box brought in from pricinct number 3444, you know how many voters there are in that polling place, how many signed in and voted, how many absentee voters walked their ballots in and how many voted *provisional* pending verification of their I.D….you know how many signed up to get absentee ballots, so if the number of votes matches what you show should be there, then you did good. And there are going to be people from all the parties there to watch everymove.
That makes me feel better.
As to Florida(another place where the counties that had problems were run by the Democrats), it wasn’t hand marked ballots that was the cause of hanging chads and the stupidity that followed. It was punch marked ballots, and then running them through a scanner. That and the very stupid Democratic ballot makers in the county where the holes didn’t match up to the candidates names(ie; Buchannon getting 2000 votes in a precinct that was heavily Democratic).
And to top it all off, Al Gore didn’t help himself by being too cute by a mile with his appeal asking for a recount in only what?…9 counties?
#29 Gary Marks…..the Secretary of State is the offical big cheese in elections. But, because this is a partisian job and other reasons, the actual planning of elections are done on the county level(in California, Ohio, and Pa. that I know for sure) The County people decide how many polling places there will be, plus buy and maintain the voting machines and train and pay the polling place workers. They also are the ones who have the offical ballots printed up. In other words, THEY run the actual election. If there isn’t enough machines, it’s THEIR fault, if there aren’t enough polling places, it’s THEIR fault, if the ballots are printed wrong, it’s THEIR fault……the Secretary Of State is just a PR position and he/she helps set the state laws on elections, with the Legislature.
The people in the medfia, or universities that make these claims have no clue about how elections are actually run and by whom.
#30 AB CD, thanks. That’s a very good article, and it puts the question of electronic vote tampering back into the court of the people making the charges, to rebut the rebuttal if they can. The article also makes more charges about Blackwell’s conduct that I hadn’t even seen before (the paper-weight issue was quite telling). A fair vote can be difficult to achieve, and every once in awhile, we see how many ways there are to try to undermine it. It’ll be interesting to see if Blackwell can win his governorship. I did a quick search, and his poll numbers don’t look so good, so maybe there’s justice after all.
But when someone as reasonable-sounding as Mark Hertsgaard says the votes just weren’t there for a Kerry win, he has a way of making you believe it. If nothing else, he certainly raises the bar for Conyers and Kennedy to make their case.
#32 joshua, you should really read AB CD’s linked article. It disagrees with your claim of such a limited role for the Secretary of State (as do other sources). Blackwell oversaw the reorganization of the precincts, which caused confusion, and made some other unfair rulings that even fellow Republicans backed away from supporting. Some of your assertions of county-level autonomy are flat-out contradicted by this source and others. According to another source, Blackwell himself blamed part of the voting machine shortage on too little federal funding through HAVA (Help America Vote Act), so your implication that county election people could just buy more machines doesn’t make sense. The county people also complained that machine allocations were based on data from Blackwell’s office that was 6 months old, further complicating existing problems. Read up on Blackwell — he wasn’t the figurehead you seem to think.
>> Sour grapes, move on and nominate a democrat who can actually win.
For the last two elections our democratic candidate DID win but were denied office by cheating.
You’d be pissed, too, of the tables were turned.
GregAllen -
Have you read the section of the US constitution that specifies how the President of the USA is elected (hint – it’s not by direct popular vote).
And even the New York Times admits that Bush won Florida.
And it wasn’t the Republicans who designed or implemented the infamous “butterfly ballot” and other atrocious ballots.