McCormack runs nothing if not a very tight ship. She is an old hand at deflecting criticism of the machines, as this case brought before the Texas Atty. General in 1986 reveals:
"Ms. Elkins also noted another apparent discrepancy in the results reported for a City Council seat. In that situation (District 7), the number of votes tallied was reported to be 10,365. This value exceeded the number of ballots reported to be cast, 9,679. In addition, in one precinct, the initial number of ballots cast, 263, was replaced later with another value, 515. These technical concerns of Ms. Elkins were supplemented by concerns that the results presented on the computer printouts were created independently of the actual totals of the voted ballots through a deliberate attempt to subvert the outcome. <52>
As a result of Ms. Elkins' complaints, it was reported that Attorney General Jim Mattox and Secretary of State Myra McDaniel began investigations into voting discrepancies. According to the Dallas Morning News of Sept. 23, 1986, "the probe centers on allegations that computerized voting equipment and computer programs used to tabulate state and local elections may have been tampered with to bring about `preprogrammed' results." <53>
In that same newspaper article, Ms. Elkins was quoted as saying that "the allegation is that the computer used to count the votes was given new instructions after it calculated that Max Goldblatt was leading Starke Taylor by 400 votes." Ms. Elkins has noted that the Dallas County computer had encountered difficulties shortly after 8 p.m. on election night, and that the candidate who was leading at 8 p.m., prior to the computer difficulties, was not leading when the computer reported again.
Ms. Conny McCormack, Dallas County Elections Administrator, admitted that the documentation for the April 6, 1985 election could appear contradictory. Her explanation was that the difficulty concerned the treatment of "split precincts," that is, those precincts bisected by the Dallas city boundary. There were 11 such split precincts. The value of 78,398 for ballots cast was produced by assuming zero ballots cast from these split precincts. The value of 80,208 for ballots cast was produced by adding the total ballots from the split precincts, including ballots cast outside of the city. The final value of 79,783 for ballots cast included only those ballots cast within the city of Dallas. Ms. McCormack contended that the recount generally confirmed the correctness of the originally reported outcome. <54>"
go to the article to read the rest of the story...the bottom line was that there was no way to know what happened to the votes. :shrug: You'd think in all her years of experience, avoiding this problem would be a priority...but she still hates verification. The machines can do it don't be silly.
http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/1988_DRE_paper
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