Ballot Counting Could Delay Calif. Results

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Alameda County's return to hand counting of some paper ballots could make for a long evening for poll workers Tuesday and leave the state's neck-and-neck Democratic gubernatorial primary undecided overnight.

Alameda could be the race's determining factor because it has 5.7 percent of the state's registered Democrats.

Polls have shown the race about even between Treasurer Phil Angelides and Controller Steve Westly, who are vying to challenge Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in November.

"We are a little nervous about statewide cliffhangers," said Guy Ashley, a spokesman for the Alameda County registrar of voters. "We would like to be fast and accurate, but if we have to choose one or the other, accurate is what we're going to choose."

The county on the east side of San Francisco Bay sidelined its electronic voting machines after they failed to meet federal and state standards.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/05/AR2006060500473.html

It's hard to control one's hate when it comes to these kinds of lame discussions. It's so obvious. "Why wait?" translates to "just let us cheat again".

in targeted states (like PA) which chirp "The new machines work FINE! And, everyone LOVES them! And, they're so FAST!" The counties that dare question the process in any way get demerits, "X County facing election day woes!"

It becomes extremely obvious.

It takes undying patience. Something we are running perilously low on. But I predict that with the leadership and research that has been done on these forums, we are approaching a mass of people in the US who are educated on this and other subjects, who will in turn pass that information along. And the prediction is that we are about to see rapid change with respect to accepted truth. Sheesh, that was wordy. I expect that we have reached a critical mass in America. And the accepted Bush mantras are quickly swirling down the drain of the republican toilet. (:

"Fast fascism" is all we've had for years.

Make every vote count! People can wait for result.

with companies asked to give employees one of the three days off as a Democracy Holiday (or even split the load and give a third off each day). So I'm obviously more interested in giving opportunities and making certain each vote counts and is counted.

Where do these idiots get the idea any of us have to have the results immediately?

Oh, the humanity! How will we survive? :sarcasm:

their touch screen voting machines, especially after what happened during the recall election.

I waited up until after 3 am left coast time to see the results of Alameda County. It was the 1st time they've used the machines. I was screaming... they're stealing the election through Alameda and some county in socal!

Zero precincts had reported in when I went to bed. Then I woke up the next morning and the groper was guv.

as opposed to bigoted, right-wing fence builders who have co-opted that title.

their paymasters of demanding an instant election result is simply a ploy, used by them to rail-road through fraudulent election results.

The world as we know it will not come to an end if they are disputed, nor even will foreign superpowers invade.

things up. Punchcards, centralized tabulators. Votes began to be treated like tomatoes or apples on an assembly line, with the "spoiled" ones tossed out. Spoilage of a vote seemed to happen more to poor Democratic voters, especially poor black voters. Votes ceased to be sacred objects, icons of our democracy. They became mere "products." Then, when that got a bit obvious, they decided to totally hypocritically and criminally speed things up more, so they could get rid of the undesired ("spoiled") ballots out of sight, with ELECTRONIC VOTING, run by Bushite corporations using "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls. Ah! Fast, very fast--faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap large Democratic turnouts in a single bound....

And meanwhile, they decided to do exit polls--not to verify elections and check for fraud (as exit polls are used worldwide)--but for instanter results. That was okay until, oh, 2000, when the pissing contest among the war profiteering corporate news monopolies on early "calling" of the election resulted in a deliberate false call for Bush by Faux News--which in turn influenced momentum for the recount in Florida. By 2004, they solved that and other problems--having to do with speed and wrong outcomes for war profiteers--by a process of feeding the "officials results" into the exit poll data, to create a smooth impression of who had won. If the exit polls said one thing, and the "official results" said something else more to their liking, they would FALSIFY the exit polls, in impossible ways, to force this predictive too, the exit polls (in other countries, a verification) tool) to MATCH the "official results." All the better if the "official results" were controlled by Republicans with secret programming code, and nobody could SEE how the votes were counted. So that's what they did in 2004. They shut down the reporting system, late on election day, and forced the exit polls, which said Kerry had won, to FIT the result of Diebold's and ES&S's secret formulae--Bush won.

That way, we could all get past this fuss and bother about "counting every vote" and non-transparent elections and egregious Republican lawbreaking in Ohio and other places, to speed up Bush's win by massively suppressing Democratic votes. Gee, all that speed, and STILL they had to mess with old black grandmothers and make them stand out in the rain for ten hours to vote. Must've been a landslide for Kerry is all I can figure--and the computers had to be pre-programmed to certain percentages, which turned out to be not sufficient.

Able to leap large Democratic turnouts in a single bound.* That's what they've got now. Diebold/ES&S are more entrenched than ever, with tighter control over vote counting, for faster and faster results. In fact, I hear that Condi is already president. We don't have to vote any more. It's now so fast, it happens before it happens.

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*(20 million more voters voted in 2004 than in 2000. The Dems blew the Repubs away in new voter registration in 2004, nearly 60/40. Figure Gore/Bush 2000 voters were a wash. You do the math. It is further known that most new voters voted for Kerry, most independent voters voted for Kerry, and most former Nader voters voted for Kerry. Who else is there? The Dems--especially the passionate, hardworking grass roots--turned out the vote, big time. Diebold/ES&S leaped over it in an almost single bound, with secret vote tabulation, but Superman's cape hit a few telephone poles on the way up adding some nasty complications (such as new voters flocking to the Democratic Party in large numbers which they'll tell you was because these new voters were determined to vote for Bush because they hate "gay marriage" or they were scared of terrorists--but that doesn't make much sense, does it?). (--about as much sense as this Superman metaphor...)