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A fund has been set up to donate money for a recount requested yesterday in the San Diego mayoral election.
Checks and money orders may be sent to:
Study California Ballots
10736 Jefferson Blvd.
# 759
Culver City, CA 90230
Here's a press release on the recount, which was requested by a citizens' activist group after a 4% shift in the vote tally was detected between parallel election results and the official tally:
Citizens' Audit Parallel Election (CAPE) Calls for Mayoral Recount
A citizens' group that conducted a "parallel election" as a "citizen audit" of the San Diego Mayoral Special Election on July 26, 2005, says they have found vote count discrepancies that warrant a hand recount of ballots in 11 precincts.
Twenty-three volunteers of CAPE (Citizens' Audit Parallel Elections), concerned about the integrity of computerized vote counting systems, conducted a parallel election using paper ballots counted by hand, for comparison to the official election results. The San Diego mayoral election was tallied by optical scanning machines and tabulating computers running private, trade-secret software owned by Diebold Election Systems. Diebold does not allow its software code to be examined, not even by county elections officials.
The official election results, tallied by computer, showed proportions of votes received by the top three finalists for mayor and for Proposition A, that differed by 4 percentage points from the results of the parallel election, counted by hand. A team of statisticians from Cal State Northridge who analyzed the two sets of vote count numbers concluded that the probability that the observed 4-percent deviation could have occurred by chance alone is less than 1 in ten million.
CAPE volunteers set up parallel election tables outside five consolidated polling locations where 3049 voters from 11 precincts in the City of San Diego cast their votes in the special mayoral election. Half of the voters --1516, or 49.7% -- volunteered to cast their votes a second time in the parallel election. Participants were asked to sign a voter roster book, pledging to cast their votes exactly as they had in the official election. They marked their votes on Parallel Election paper ballot forms (identical in content but visually distinguishable from official ballots), and deposited them in sealed ballot boxes. The boxes were unsealed and the ballots were counted by hand that evening on camera in the studios of KGTV News Channel 10, fulfilling CAPE's pledge to count the parallel election ballots in public. In contrast, the official ballots are counted by computers running secret software, a process that is inherently unobservable by the public.
CAPE will hold a press conference Friday, August 12, in the Civic Center concourse, outside of City Hall, 220 C St., to announce filing a request with the San Diego County Registrar of Voters for a hand recount of the official ballots in the 11 precincts where the parallel election was conducted. CAPE will be required to pay the cost of the recount and is raising the estimated $2500 through volunteer donations.
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