help: need witnesses to NC 08 recount

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Hey, I am looking for first hand accounts from observers of the "recount"
of the NC 08 in Mecklenburg County.

Already have one account, wonder if there are others who might tell what
they saw.

Mecklenburg is the county with touchscreens that use the difficult to recount
"toilet paper ballot".

[Hudba]

1. I was an observer...

at both the machine recount in Cabarrus County and the hand recount in Stanly County.:patriot:

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. can you describe your experience w/ the recount?

Stanly is 100% optical scan with automark electronic ballot marking machines.

However, Cabarrus has a mix of optical scan and touchscreens.

-Did you observe the "recount" of the touchscreens there?
-Did they have differences between the machine count and the paper trail?
-Did they have an honest recount or did they say that the machine is always
right and "keep counting until they match"?
-Were you allowed to closely view the paper ballots (on optical scan) and paper trail (touchscreen)?

[Hudba]

6. My experiences

Cabarrus County only used the touchscreen machines for the early vote. On election day we used only optical scan machines.
In Cabarrus County we only had a machine recount, since we conceded the race the day before the hand recount there was supposed to have happened.
You can find My report on the machine recount in Cabarrus County right http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=170x8339">here.
I saw a little machine print out results on a roll that I believed to have been from the early vote touchscreen machines.
As far as I could tell they had an honest recount.
I did closely watch the ballots of the optical scan, they even showed us ballots where people had made obvious mistakes (someone punched holes through the ovals instead of coloring them in, another drew arrows toward the candidate he wanted to vote for). All the ballots that weren't filled in correctly were "spit out" by the machine and then a panel looked at those ballots and counted them if the voter intend was obvious.
I did not look closely at the roll that was printed out by the touchscreen machines.
Nobody ever said "the machine is always right".

[KatieB]

2. Mecklenburg County uses nothing BUT touchscreens - 100%

See this website-->
http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/voterweb/Orders%20for%202006%20Primary.htm

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

3. yes but they have paper trail and law requires manual recount

I know that Mecklenburg County has 1,000 ES&S iVotronics with
the RTAL (Real Time Audit Log) that records the voters choices
on a paper reel to the left of the touchscreen - as the
voter makes his/her selections.

The law we worked for since Sept 2003 - that was passed
on August 13, 2005 requires that every voting system in the state
have a voter verified paper ballot/trail for every vote,
and that the paper serves as the official ballot of record if
there are discrepancies.

Mecklenburg may have ignored the law and pretended to do a proper recount.

I don't know, and I need more people who were there to provide
their account of what happened.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

5. here is picture of machine in Mecklenburg

Note the "paper trail" to the left of the touchscreen.

[daverts]

7. Mecklenburg undervote analysis

I've put a site up that has some info on the Meck recount, plus data and analysis of a significant county-wide undervote that may have potentially affected the Kissell-Hayes results.

Scrutiny of the vote totals has revealed an unexplained undervote: a significantly higher percentage of voters than in the past declined to vote for the most prominent races such as those for US House of Representatives. Never in past years had the Congressional races been "outperformed" by downballot races such as for sheriff, county commissioner etc.... but it did happen in 2006. Mecklenburg County includes parts of three Congressional districts. ALL three districts had a significantly higher undervote in Mecklenburg than they did in other counties, and all three races had a significantly higher undervote than they did past years for the same race.

Many of you will realize that this undervote has implications in NC-08 because of the closeness of the Kissell-Hayes election, but it is also relevant to the undervote in FL-13 (Christine Jennings race) because that election also used the ES&S iVotronic. However, unlike in Florida, the iVotronics used in Mecklenburg do have a paper trail that could provide evidence that the ES&S voting machines are not as infallible as some would suppose.

During a meeting last week with the Mecklenburg Board of Elections, they admitted that there was an unexplained undervote based on the data that is presented on the site. However, they do not believe that it is possible that machine error could have played any role in the undervote, and they did not want to allow scrutiny of precinct-specific machine tapes because they claimed that we could determine individual voter identity from the tapes because they are serial records that could be matched to voter order, a far-fetched defense that presupposes our knowing on which machine each voter voted and memorization of the voter log.

Please visit the site for more details...