NJ feb 5th presidential primary errors

[FogerRox]

You may have caught part of this story before, I am about to receive an excell spreadsheet citing those errors in Essex County. Interestingly enough, the errors are over votes, the town of Fairfield had 10% overvotes, 10% more votes than people that signed in to vote.......

[Ellipsis]

1. "the errors are over votes" Well... ain't that curious.

Looking forward to the numbers.

K&R

[FogerRox]

3. Our Essex Democratic County Committe Chairman is finally willing to look

He got a hold of the results, and passed it to a friend of mine, who is running against an incumbant, the same incumant who I fought 3 years ago when my county purchased the Sequoia Advantage.

This incumbant was promised a primary challenger, retaliation for pushing the Sequoia contract thru. Chritine jenning in FL-13, we would have never known what happened in Sarasota, except they post precinct level rsults on the net, NJ doesnt do this, so to see the DEM Machine reach out for help is a big deal.


But we fucking told them 3 years ago the Sequoia Advantage cant count, I personally introduced 100's of pages of documents, and spoke at great length, even tried to debate one of the top election officials in NJ during a freeholder meeting.

Finally we get something to audit.

Now you know why we have these machines being inspected by outside sources, per a court order, because of errors. Overvotes no less.

[Ellipsis]

6. Apparently Essex County had problems with the state wide voter registration database as well.

Question: Do you know how the votes were transfered to tabulators... by modem or data cartridge?

Just curious.




Edited to add: data base issues were flopping registrations.

[FogerRox]

8. Precinct level tabs

But thats not the point, the voting machines had overvotes. Not the tabulators.

[Ellipsis]

16. Understood.

[Wilms]

2. How does an overvote even happen?

I thought overvotes were a thing of the past with these new fangled video-votin' machines of the future. What the heck?!

Hey. Wait a sec. There was no such thing as an overvote on the lever machines we threw out. :grr:

[FogerRox]

4. County officals supporting Clinton ?

Its been said, that had NJ voted 2 or 3 weeks later than Feb 5th, Obama would have won the NJ primary.

19 of 21 county Dem Chairs supported Clinton. There is no way of ever knowing.

[OnTheOtherHand]

7. semantic quibble about "overvotes"

If I understand Foger's OP correctly, he means there were more votes than voters signed in. That could happen just because the sign-in sheets are incorrect -- or because of any numbers of problems (or "problems") with the machines.

What most people mean by "overvotes" is votes that are thrown out because someone attempted to vote too many times in a single race. Both undervotes and overvotes lead to fewer valid votes in a race than there were ballots cast.

I don't have all the facts about Essex now, so I could be misunderstanding him.

[FogerRox]

9. Say 100 people sign in to vote, and the Sequoia Advantage has 106

at the end of voting. Each voter is personally escorted from signing in to the voting machine.

And it was a presidential primary, its not like there was a full ballot.... ya know....

[OnTheOtherHand]

12. yeah, that's what I thought you meant

In case it wasn't clear, my one point is that that isn't what people usually mean by "overvote." The classic "overvote" is, say, people in Ohio who saw this on their ballots:

Bush
Kerry
candidate disqualified
Peroutka
Badnarik

and voted for, say, Kerry and Badnarik -- presumably because they thought they were supposed to choose one candidate in each of two races. Instead, they voted twice for president, so neither vote was counted.

(The gruesome version in Florida 2000 was people who voted for Gore twice, once as a write-in. If those overvotes had been counted....)

Having more votes than voters obviously is a problem no matter what it is called.

[FogerRox]

13. Cant do that on a Sequoia Advantage.

I know a wee bit about the hardware & SW.

[OnTheOtherHand]

15. right, which was Wilms' point, I thought n/t

[Melissa G]

5. Hmmmm... lots of money for machines that can't count.

Can't wait to see what passes for an explanation this time and how the MCM covers it up.

[FogerRox]

10. Its gotten good press, afterall Our law suit has Princeton Professors inspecting the

The Secret vote counters in a lab, which the Star Ledger has covered somewhat fairly. Just that now "I know" what the errors are that the paper reported.

[Melissa G]

11. Well Foger, don't hold me in suspense ... tell me what 'you know' n/t

[FogerRox]

14. I'm supposed to get an excel file tonite

I dont know if its broken down to the precinct level or what.