Partial recount vindicates San Diego voting machines

[rinsd]

Partial recount vindicates San Diego voting machines

Tallies nearly identical, says a county official

By Daniel J. Chacón
STAFF WRITER

August 24, 2005

Voting machines that critics have labeled unreliable work after all.

A partial recount yesterday to test the accuracy of scanners that read ballots and tallied votes in the San Diego mayor's race July 26 revealed results that were nearly identical to those of the machines.

For example, a discrepancy of perhaps one vote occurred in a few precincts.

"This is what you would expect in a properly conducted election," San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas said. "I think the people of San Diego can take comfort, if they had doubts at all, about the conduct of the election."

Members of the group that asked and paid for the recount of about 30 of the city's 713 precincts said they still had doubts about a voting system that relies on computers."

More at: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050824/news_7m24recount.html

[wli]

1. I don't buy it for an instant. n/t

[Oerdin]

5. Well...

Senings how they actually know what they're talking about and you don't please excuse us for believing them.

This was all based upon a completely nonscientific exit poll and was garbage from the very beginning. There are paper ballots which were recounted along with the electronic tallies. The whole thing is entirely tracable. Sure, we can tweak a few things here and there for improvements but those of you claiming voter fraud are doing it based not upon facts but upon some sort of religious like belief. Please excuse the rest of us for wanting hard facts before we believe such accussations.

[wli]

8. religious my arse

The minute number of districts recounted and the "random" choice of districts to recount, as pointed out by another poster, make for an easy coverup.

Near-zero faith levels in "self-audits" is not religious belief in Republican election fraud. They are extremely untrustworthy and the description largely matched that of a Potemkin village tour.

"This is not adequate evidence of integrity" and the general assumption of the continuation of corruption based on precedent is not "religious belief."

[Oerdin]

9. So what does constitute proof in your mind?

Let's leave aside the fact that there's never been proof of voter fraud and this alligation is all based upon a dubious exit poll system which has been thoroughly discredited in the past. Instead lets just deal with your beliefs. In your mind what is necissary for us to be able to say the elections are clean?

Do we have to 100% hand recount of every ballot every election? Can we just randomly pick a statistical sampling? To my knowledge no one has explained how the precinct sample was choosen so it is a bit premature to declare the vote rigged don't you think? I do agree that we should always make elections more transparent though and we should make sure the process can easily be observed. Some of the claims made in this thread are baseless just on their face; San Diego doesn't use touch screen voting so the claim that people touch one candidate and the vote goes to another does not apply to this election. The ballots are scantron forms with all the questions written on them in HUGE print with only like 3-4 questions on a normal sized paper and the voter fills it out with a number two pencil.

The votes are scanned before the voter leaves and he can see the results on the reciept before he leaves so corrections can be made on site in the event of an error. There are no hanging chads or those buggy touch screens in San Diego. I've voted in several other cities and I can honestly say it's the best system I've seen.

[cascadiance]

10. It isn't just the voting machines that are of concern...

It is how the vote totals are accumulated and put in to the Central Tabulator machine that was the main object of concern for this election, especially when they violated rules and had this machine connected to the internet on top of not having this machine effectively visible to outside observors (it was kept too far away from the viewing booth for observors to see what was going on and requests to move it closer to the observors were denied).

Many steps to remove doubt that would have been easy to have accomplished were not taken in this election, which already creates some suspicion. Now that's not to say that there was corrupt about the election itself, but given these notes, it does leave one some doubts and suspicion as to whether it was above board.

I myself am not familiar enough with statistics and whether or not the results found by these "exit poll" machines was sufficiently out of bounds to be considered anomalous. It sounds like a number of folks felt that it was. My feeling is that for it to be worth pursuing, they had to be relatively sure that something was wrong.

As for the recount itself, as I noted earlier, it is CRITICAL to know how they selected which ballots they recounted to ensure that those that might have created the problem (if there was one) didn't have the opportunity to avoid detection by steering the recount to votes that wouldn't show anomalies. News reports we've seen still don't establish the rules on how they approached what votes were used for the recount. I think that is the one thing to press on to establish whether this was done fairly. Otherwise, despite their statements otherwise, I view the results of this recount to be inconclusive.

Someone in our Dem meeting was pointing out that the different precinct officials (I think she was meaning the City Clerks, but I'd have to confirm that) that are responsible for voting issues in all parts of this city are *all* Republicans, which also contributes to concerns of potential abuse too.

[FormerRepublican]

2. Well...

If you press a button for Kerry, and the machine selects Bush and prints Bush on the paper used for a recount, what good is a recount?

To make voting machines legit, there needs to be something the voter can use to verify that what the machine selected is what the voter actually chose.

[Oerdin]

6. Did you vote in San Diego?

I did. You hand fill out your own large very simple scantron ballot which is about 20 times larger in print then the average scan tron. Each box is marked right there with a giant bubble next to each name so it's hard to screw it up. The machine reads the ballot right there while you wait just encase there is any trouble in reading it so things can be fixed by the voter before they leave. Then the original ballot is retained encase a recount is needed and the voter is issued a reciept.

If you were from San Diego you'd know that. There are original paper ballots which the voter filled out and that's what is recounted. Like I said some things have been identified which need to be changed to better protect the system but so far there is no crediable indication of any sort of systematic fraud like some people here had been claiming. That's just the facts.

[rinsd]

11. Touchscreens were not used....these were scantron sheets (nt)

[cascadiance]

3. Were the precincts that were recounted truely randomly selected?

Otherwise, we'd have the same problem we had in Ohio. If someone is allowed to pick the precincts they knew weren't being messed with, then of course we won't see a problem.

[Oerdin]

7. That is a good question.

I would like to know which precincts were recounted and if it was an entire recount of those precincts plus how those precincts were selected.

[bemildred]

4. "worked once" is not "reliable" and still less is it "secure", nt