NYTimes: 0-bama at as Many as 80 'Heavily Black' New York City Precincts

[kster]

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 2/16/2008

Paper Says 'Handful' of Zero Vote Totals Also Recorded for Clinton on City's Old Lever Machine, Before Offering Readers an Advertisement for New Electronic Voting Systems...


The conspiracy theorists at the New York Times today tell us something is amiss, but proceed to ultimately tell us nothing about why it happened, suggesting that all is just fine...and that it'd be even better if the city "upgraded" to new electronic voting machines...


Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district.

City election officials this week said that their formal review of the results, which will not be completed for weeks, had confirmed some major discrepancies between the vote totals reported publicly — and unofficially — on primary night and the actual tally on hundreds of voting machines across the city.

In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136. In an even more heavily black district in Brooklyn — where the vote on primary night was recorded as 118 to 0 for Mrs. Clinton — she now barely leads, 118 to 116.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5701

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. Somebody give Brad a clue stick ... our levers stink

They always stunk and we need a paper trail. Period.

[kster]

2. Your levers need to be replaced with a Hand counted Paper election

give it up pal, secret vote counting IS OVER!!!

[Fredda Weinberg]

3. We won't count by hand. Optical scans are just fine. It's Luddites

who've kept us from implementing best practices.

[kster]

4. I'm willing to fight for Hand Counted Paper Elections, Are you

willing to fight for Optical scans?

[aquart]

5. If there's no record of the votes, how were they able to "correct" the numbers?

Huh?

THINK!

[OnTheOtherHand]

6. who said "there's no record"?

Actually, the problem seems to be that there are multiple records. The machines are (at least in principle) locked after the election, so they provide one record; the election inspectors create a second written record at the polling places; and then the police department apparently types the written numbers into a computer, and those numbers become the source of the unofficial results.

Someone may know that the inspectors' records show anomalous zeros for Obama, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. I sure haven't seen evidence that the machines showed zeros for Obama. Most likely the problem came at the last step.

[Wilms]

7. Oh, you and the facts again!

There goes another pointless and reality free discourse as a result of you insisting on including the truth.

You're no fun.

[Bill Bored]

8. Actually, there are 3 paper records produced by the lever voting system, in compliance with HAVA

and local requirements:

Bi-partisan teams of election inspectors read counters at the precinct on election night and makes 3 paper copies:

1. Retained by County Board of Elections (or borough in NYC)
2. Sent to police for MANUAL transcription into computers where the media can retrieve the results
3. Paper copy delivered to the media

Then every machine is recanvassed by bi- / multi- partisan teams, including lawyers for the candidates, to see if anyone made a mistake in the original transcription that created the paper audit trail.

So these error are likely to be human errors and they will be corrected by humans as well.

Compare this system of triple checking the results recorded on paper, without the need for software or printers, to what passes for "election integrity" in other areas of the country with their modems, printers, thermal paper, memory cards, proprietary central tabulators and ballot definition programming!

[Bill Bored]

9. Here are some Clinton supporters from the community:

Congressman Rangel


Lt. Gov. Paterson


Assemblyman Wright


And Obama supporter State Senator Perkins


Gee, do you think maybe race is not an issue here?