Once again we have an election where the exit polls don’t match the actual vote, where examples of voter suppression efforts abound in areas largely supporting one candidate (Obama), where not enough voting machines were available in areas largely supporting one candidate (Obama), where voters were even denied their right to vote on provisional ballots as required by federal law, etc. I could provide the details to support these claims, but Brad Blog has already done a far better job than I ever could. So if you are interested go visit his site for the detailed support for these strange and curious events reported at the Pennsylvania polls yesterday.
All I can say is this is all awfully reminiscent of my experiences in Cleveland, Ohio in 2004 as a volunteer for Election Protection. The same issues about broken machines, insufficient numbers of voting machines, voters mysteriously purged from voting rolls, long lines at polling places in one candidate’s strongholds, exit polls off significantly, etc. Now maybe as BooMan suggests, a lot of white people lied to the exit pollsters, but I don’t believe that. If the lying was to occur, I’d think it would be most likely to happen in the the numerous poll results produced prior to votes actually being cast, not after. And of course, all the votes were tallied on voting machines with no paper trail, and which have previously been shown to be easily hackable and/or incorrectly register votes cast for one candidate to another, or otherwise fail to register votes properly. But that’s just one old white guy’s opinion.
Was there evidence of voting irregularities in Pennsylvania? Yes, that much is clear. Was it enough to prevent an Obama victory? Maybe, maybe not. Was it enough to increase Clinton’s margin of victory to double digits, thus keeping her candidacy viable? I’ll let you make that call on your own.
yes, I know. I’m just another crazy tin foil hat conspiracy theorist who should be locked up in a rubber room until after the elections this Fall are over.
I’m not saying you’re a crazy tinfoil-hat conspiracy nut, but I do think the case was much, much stronger in New Hampshire than it was in Pennsylvania from what I’ve seen. I’m glad Brad is still trying to keep track of this stuff, though, because the system really is a joke.
Funny how all those Clinton(NeoCon-NY) voters have cried foul in past elections, this primary….”nothing to see here let;s move on”……
This will come back to bite the Clinton Democratic Party …….
No paper trails.
It is time to start talking about serving as election officers. Good election officers can enforce existing laws that gives the voter the benefit of the doubt in provisional ballot situations. Good election officers can enforce voter ID laws that is most consistent with guaranteeing citizen access to the ballot. Good election officers can call the law down on poll workers engaged in voter suppression tactics. A good election officer is worth 1,000 election observers. The Democratic party has consistently failed to recruit good election officers.
If the machines are bad, or there is not enough of them, election officers cannot do much about that, but there are thousands of ways a good election officer can help.
let me not hear Rice criticizing Mugabe.
there were reports of the machines malfunctioning in the Philly precints. The Voters Group went to court requesting a judge to extend voting hours. That plea was rejected.
what was the tally? As long as it was not double digits. Can’t take the crowing.
Kos has it at 9-point diff. 99.07% of precints reporting.
Hillary said ‘the tide has turned’ or some such something. Tide has turned. Indeed.
from the paper that endorsed Hillary, the NY Times editorial board
and Matt Yglesias cries out Save Us!
Amen
According to the Pennsylvania State Dept. the tally is:
Clinton – 1,237,696 54.3%
Obama – 1,043,174 45.7%
That’s 8.6%.
thanks….Drudge has a headline….all that for ten delegates?
Interesting comment on possible voting irregularities in Philly. I’ve been living in Philly or just outside for the last 30 years, so I’m aware of the way politics works in Philly. Steven D is suggesting voter suppression in Philly. Well, normally this is a tin foil hat view, but Philly is different. Clinton has Rendell, Nutter, and the Philly democratic machine in her corner. They are experts at “voter enhancement” – turning out 105% of all voters in any heavily democratic ward. The only question is, after decades of playing offense, can they switch over to suppression. I say yes. Suppression is really easier than enhancement. There’s no need to visit the cemeteries to gather names. They just need to monkeywrench a few machines.
Even more interesting: in their studies (mentioned in this post) Dr. Sarah Evertt found something very odd about voting machines. Apparently
In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that if the voting machines in PA were flipping one in every ten votes from Obama to Clinton and showing the flip on their summary screen, no-one would notice. The handful that did notice would write it off as user error, and go back and correct it. There would be no widespread evidence of “mistaken” summary screens. Hell, it probably wouldn’t even show up in certification testing. One in ten votes would simply mysteriously shift to the other column, the machine would tell the user about it, and no-one would notice. Even a printed paper record has the same problem.
There are two acceptable answers to the voting problem so far: hand-counted paper ballots and optically scanned paper ballots. Nothing else is acceptable. Ever.
Some actual math: if you flip 5% of the votes at random and display the result on the summary screen, and 33% of voters notice when their vote has been flipped, then just over 1.6% of all voters are going to notice a problem on average. A quick Google search turns up input error rates that range from 2% to 10%. So if we only flip 5% of the vote (producing a 10% difference out of a tied race) then 1.6% of the electorate is going to notice. Assume that none of these people would have made an input error, input errors only happen to 2% of voters, and all voters who make an input error report it. Our total reported input error rate is 3.6%. If input errors and their reporting are randomly distributed, the total error rate is 2.26%. I’m pretty sure that that’s statistically indistinguishable.
The New Hampshire vote was particularly disturbing. Not only did the exit polls not match the results, but in places where they hand-counted there were anomalies which seemed to indicate that that exit polls were correct. Now, those votes were done on Diebold optical scanners. As far as I know the “limited recount” that the secretary of state allowed did not include the simple comparison of matching the number of people who signed the rolls to vote with the votes tallied; the memory cards from the machines were never examined for failure or for tampering or illicit programming; and only some of the ballots were hand-counted. The rest of the ballots were presumed to be what the Diebold machines said. In other words, there were hints that there was some hankypanky, the SoS behaved as if there were some hankypanky, and there was no real full recount.
Now, as bad as that is, there is no way to recount a single vote made on those PA machines. This is about what the situation was in South Carolina, so this isn’t the hatching of a conspiracy theory against Clinton. As I’ve said before, the historical relationship has been between Republicans and voting machine companies, and there is nothing that would better sink Clinton than having her win the nomination and then expose that her victory in New Hampshire was a fraud (even if she had nothing to do with the fraud).
Anyway, Reverend Wright has me investigating the origin of AIDS, so that’s all I got now.
Hi Bob, I hope we get a diary about your AIDS investigating?
I see Hillary is now telling Matt Lauer that she now has more votes than Obama…
She does! … If you count the states that are important. Coincidentally, she’s won all of the states that are important, so she also has more delegates and more states won. Even more fortuitously, she plans to obliterate the unimportant states with nuclear weapons as soon as she sets foot in the White House. She needs a practice run for Iran, after all, and they’re just ungrateful bastards who didn’t realize how good she was anyway.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure at this point that Clinton’s scary-insane.
Don’t forget, under the Republican system (where she truly belongs with her 9/11 scare tactics and penchant for obliterating Iran), she’d have already won.
She’s counting Michigan in Florida in her totals. Of course, Obama got NO votes in Michigan, because his name wasn’t on the ballot. And of course, a number of the caucus states don’t record the actual popular vote, so those votes aren’t in her totals.
So her totals are not valid.
Even more to the point, popular vote totals are not a valid metric to use in the primary, because the Democratic primaries aren’t set up that way. The Democratic primary is set up to count DELEGATES, not the popular vote, the popular vote is NOT a valid meeasurement of this race.
Is she now taking credit for Bill’s votes in ’92 and ’96, or is she counting her votes when she ran for Senate?
I gotta tellya Steven- it’s RACISM. Plain and simple. Good old fashioned Racism. It is a sad commentary but go check out the stats. itwill be denied but there is no way around it.This country is simply a racist country and the world is seeing it.
But the US is no more racist than other countries, that’s for sure. You think it’s bad here, go somewhere else in the world and see how racist other nations are. Darfur comes to mind . . . .
The rest of the world aside, we like to think that America has at least made an effort to respect equal rights.
Billjpa’s comment makes me angry; simply because I grudgingly agree.
As usual, AngryBlackBitch has a good comment on Bill C’s use of race card
If you think your angry then let me tellya- I am so pissed that I couldn’t sleep last night as the results came in.ANGRY-For over 50 years, I have been fighting the good fight. AND I will continue to do so. BUT- ANGRY- Maybe if there was alot more angery folks out there, there might not be a racist problem. And, for whoever posted re the fact that there are alot of other racist countries across the world- Big fucking deal. Bad argument. That’s the justification for all of the horrors that are taking place out there.
I had trouble sleeping last night too. I think it had something to do with the super nachos and all the onions in the salsa that gave me a little dispepsia, but seeing a gleeful Pat Buchanan getting all jiggy (or jiggily) that old white people were voting against a black man didn’t sit well either.
So Clinton has to get around 70% of the votes the rest of the way. That would require her to get a 40% separation between her and Obama in EVERY race. She got what, an eight and a half percent final separation in Pennsylvania?
As discouraging as the racism and the Clinton Republican talking points are, and as disillusioning and damaging as her Bataan Death March has been to the Democratic Party, she is surely eliminating herself from ever running for President again. Consider this her farewell tour.
This old broad woke up this morning taking a 2nd look at Cynthia McKinney I was so pissed. And I kept remembering my conversation with one of my state’s SuperDels last Saturday where he said he wasn’t declaring until he was on the down glide path flying into Denver for Convention.