Chicago Tribune: Part of Vote Blame on Orr

[AtLiberty]

This story was on the FRONT PAGE of the Tribune's Metro Section.

Please write a note to John McCormick to thank him for this article and to please follow up:

[e-mail]


Part of vote blame on Orr

Election report faults county clerk, technology firm

By John McCormick
Tribune staff reporter
Published January 9, 2007

Cook County Clerk David Orr and Sequoia Voting Systems are both to blame for vote-tabulation delays that triggered confusion and distrust following the November election, a panel of experts has concluded.

Led by retired federal Judge Abner Mikva, the Orr-appointed panel found that a combination of "technology failures in multiple areas" and a lack of testing triggered a spiraling series of glitches that left some results unclear for days.

The group's findings, documented in a 29-page report obtained by the Tribune, suggest that much work is needed if similar problems are to be prevented in the February and April municipal elections.

"Although technology problems occurring on Election Night constituted the primary cause of the reporting delays, operational shortcomings in the process leading up to Election Day also played a role in failing to understand and thus mitigate the risks," the report said...

For full story:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0701090215jan09,1,165486.story?coll=chi-newslocalchicago-hed

[mopinko]

1. more snippits.

>>In preparing its report, the panel heavily leveraged reporting work done by Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, a firm Sequoia hired after the election at a cost of more than $300,000 to conduct a forensic examination of what went wrong.
snip

in other words- we didn't investigate ourselves too much, we just took sequioa's word for it.


>> The panel also found that Sequoia, in a more than $50 million system sold to Chicago and Cook County, had stitched together components from its own shelves and that of its parent company in a way that failed to seamlessly work together.
snip

$50M. $50M. god damn it. couldn't you buy blackberries for every precinct for that kind of money? jesus. these machines look and act like something manufactured in the 70's. 2 ton, clunky, balky boat anchors.
re- transmissions- the system is so stupid that if your transmission fails, you are told NOT TO TRY AGAIN, or you will screw "things" up. (whatever things that may be, they don't seem to know)
really, they seemed designed to frustrate and overwhelm the citizen poll workers. there was a post yesterday about long time poll workers throwing in the towel over these things. i can't help thinking that is part of the plan. there is just no reason for the craptastic way this shit is designed.

[AtLiberty]

2. The Orr-appointed panel...

lol

How cool to appoint the panel who would investigate you?

You'd say, "I know you'll need to assign some blame to me, but I can take it. Place most of your criticism here..."

[truedelphi]

3. What is the timeline on these things? Did they come into

Operation after the 2004 election?

Don't remember any discuission of them during or before that election.

[Wilms]

4. K & R n/t

[galloglas]

5. So the Tribune woke up!

How far we have come since the spring of '05 when Bob Koehler, one of their own editors covered the Nashville Convention and write the first MSM story about Election Theft.

Then his boss came back and pooh-oohed the article. Pissed me off so bad, I still quiver when I think about that.

Three cheers for Bob Koehler!!

[kster]

6. The silent scream of numbers

The silent scream of numbers
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency

http://commonwonders.com/archives/col290.htm

[kster]

7. Oh yea one of my favorite DU threads, on the subject

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x363754