New York recount.

A few weeks ago, we were getting reports from New York that a recount in the close state senate race was showing that election day vote tallies were inaccurate. The recount was turning up more votes for the democratic candidate ON NEARLY EVERY MACHINE, as compared to election day. Further... seals were missing or damaged on many machines.

Since errors were consistently made on many machines, all in favor of the republican, many here thought this to be very close to evidence of tampering. Seems like this was EXACTLY what we are looking for.

Then....poof! No news. I've asked on the New York state forum and I've looked for posts elsewhere.

Anybody know what the results are? And if there are no final results, why is it taking so long? Is it because there are clear tampering signs, and they don't want this known before the electoral delegates meet for the presidential race? Why were seals missing? Did the race flip?

In the larger scheme of things, this recount and the questions above seem very important. They go to reliability of elections, something all of us are trying to get to the bottom of.

I was interested in that too. The machines were impounded because some had seals missing and the democrats claimed that there were already votes for the republican (Nicholas Spano) on the machines before the polls opened. I haven't found any follow up news on the fraud allegations at all. But the election is still being decided and is in court. Spano is leading by a slim margin.

Here's one article: http://www.nynews.com/newsroom/121004/b0110senate35.html

If that state election was dirty and questionable, they don't want it to contaminate the larger presidential election. If there were no suspicion of tampering, it would have been resolved.

Sounds dirty to me, and we'll find out after inauguration.

May not be finished before Jan 1.

(see link to nynews above)

This article says errors were made in the Repub's favor, and that can be done if a poll worker reads the lever machine totals wrong, and that is quite possible.

"A review of the machines found many errors in Spano's favor and his lead was reduced to a minuscule nine votes by Nov. 10...." http://www.newsday.com/news/local/state/ny-bc-ny--run-onrecount1202dec02,0,1307594,print.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork

I don't see anything in the article that ascribes a lever issue to the errors. The idea doesn't make sense either, since we are talking about a reporting or counting error. The democrat's vote total AS REPORTED was less than it should have been, apparently, based on machine recounting. Whether or not someone made an error in pulling the lever is irrelevant.

From your Newsday article, which is a week old:

...

Republicans successfully ousted a Democratic judge from the case by pointing out that his name, as a judicial candidate, was on the ballots he would be examining. He was replaced by a Republican judge from Nassau County. And they used investigators and mailings to gather evidence to challenge some of the absentee and provisional votes.

Henry Berger, the Democrats' lawyer, said 98 percent of the Republicans' challenges were frivolous and were meant to disenfranchise college students, minorities and seniors.

"Old Aunt Sadie signed her registration card 40 or 50 years ago and her signature is a little different now, so they challenge her," he said. "Republicans seem to think in this day and age that the only way they can win an election is by suppressing Democratic votes."

...

The election stinks. The recount stinks, thanks to RW strategery.

about 22 machines having missing seals and that the machines were impounded. then reference to that aspect of that race wasn't mentioned again. I thought it was weird, and I'm inclined to believe the speculation that it's not being mentioned because of the presidential race.

I just searched google for the original nov 8 Newsday.com article and it is no longer archived. I think I saved it on my computer at home though. If you're interested I can post if (if that doesn't violate rules of this board?) or send it to anyone interested.

I'm finding that media outlets have let their links to that article expire...usual policy.

Post requests for old new articles --- there may be folks around
who have access to lexis-nexis and can obtain them that way -- just
because something is no longer available for free on the web doesn't
mean that it is gone for good....

Snips from an nbc article:

.....

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Westchester County legislator who challenged incumbent state Senator Nicholas Spano, took a lead today as election workers double-checked voting machines in the 35th Senate District.

Jonathan Rosen, director of the state Democrats' campaign committee, says Stewart-Cousins was up by 263 machine votes in late afternoon.

snip

G-O-P election lawyer John Ciampoli yesterday acknowledged gains for Stewart-Cousins but said they don't mean anything until the recanvass is finished.

A week earlier, the unofficial election night tally had her behind by 16-hundred-and-74 votes.

.....

The recount is still going on, but she has apparently erased a 1600 vote deficit. No mention is made of why there was a tallying error.

I'm new, how does one "kick"

I'm also a newbie, but IIUC, a "kick" is simply adding a reply to a topic, thus bringing it back to the top of the index page of the forum.

Any time you respond, it "kicks" the thread to the top of the board....it may not not last long because often the action is fast and furious. If you don't have a comment on the message, but you want something to stay near the top because you approve the contents of the thread, you can just put "Kick!" in the header to your post. If you write "kick/nt" or "kick/eom" it means "no text" or "end of message" which confirms that you are *only* kicking the thread and not adding any new content.

Welcome to DU, Duncan! :toast:

Thanks for the nice explanation, I thought maybe
you had to have 1000+ posts to do it, or something
like that :)

And welcome to Duncan! :toast:

...than the recognition that NEARLY ALL MACHINES showed an increase in votes for the democratic candidate as compared to reported tallies on election day. Random error does not result in this pattern.

I'll try to find the original article where this was reported.

Very Interesting . . . . KICK! . . . . I remember way back when people were saying that New York was an anomaly since its exit polls were way off even though it didn't use electronic voting . . . I guess this means these levers aren't any more reliable. Does anyone know how tampering could have taken place there?

Mr. G

sound like a hush hush thing to me.Keep at those stories.

is possible, but it's not all that easy to do.

They have no paper trail, so in a some sense they
are akin to the DRE's.

A lot of these machines have been around since 1890,
and they are built like tanks. It's not exactly
trivial to open them up or carry them around. A
maintenace technician who knew the machines well
enough might possibly be paid beforehand to adjust
some gears or cams inside, I suppose, but I'm not
sure it would be very easy to do, without leaving
evidence.

Even if this is possible, you'ld have to access the
machine afterward, and put it back the way it was, or
it would definitely be detectable.

The other way to tamper would be for poll workers to
simply add on votes, after the polls close. This is
supposed to be prevented by putting seals on the machines
after voting ends, then counting in a central location.

The number of votes cast can be checked against the
number of signatures on the precinct records, of course,
so to make the fraud untraceable, you have to forge those
signatures too.

I don't know the history, as to whether there are
specific cases where the first type of fraud happened
in NY.

I'm going to try to do a little research on that.

How to tamper with lever machines.

...

Weak equipment

Voting jurisdictions across the country use five varieties of lever-operated machines, six kinds of punch cards, 10 sorts of optical scanning systems and six types of touch-screen computers.

Every system has its weaknesses.

In 1998, the most recent year with records available, New York City reported trouble calls on 474--or nearly 8%--of the 6,221 metal lever-action machines that it deployed.

Each is a 900-pound hunk of metal parts crammed into a gray steel cabinet that stands 6 feet, 4 inches and looks like it dispenses cigarettes. Voters flip toggle switches to choose their candidates, then pull a big lever to record the choices on a mechanical counter.

The machines are called Shoups, after the Ransom Shoup family in Pennsylvania that began making them decades ago. They are stored in five warehouses and hauled each election day to 1,300 polling sites from the northern reaches of the Bronx to Rockaway Beach in Queens.

For 38 years, these clunky monsters have taken a pounding. "We had one that fell onto the hood of a Buick," says Richard Wagner, a voting machine technician since 1968. "An automobile has 5,000 parts; a voting machine has 27,000 parts. If a guy drops it from the moving truck, it goes out of alignment. If it's put out of alignment enough, it won't work."

The machines also are comparatively easy to rig. Louisiana changed to a Shoup competitor in lever machines several years ago after state Rep. Emile "Peppi" Bruneau showed fellow lawmakers, with coaching from a voting machine technician, how to steal a Shoup-equipped election.

With his cigarette lighter, Bruneau softened a lead plug that sealed the machine. With a pair of pliers, he removed a copper wire embedded in the plug. With a screwdriver, he took off the back cover and a Plexiglas lid protecting the vote counting mechanism. With a Q-Tip, he prodded the counter digit by digit, manipulating the vote total as easily as he might reset an alarm clock.

...


Not exactly reassuring, if you ask me, even if NYC was 80% blue.

...unless it is done clumsily and the number of "new" votes exceeds the number of voters.

Or...the seals are damaged and missing.

Isn't the point of seals to make sure that,if the seal is compromised, we know the vote is compromised? Bizarre...

in such a way that if they are broken, they are
very hard to reseal without that being detectable.

So there should be some unique feature
of the seal that gets broken and is hard to
put back just as it was. What might be implied in the
account I referenced is that the seal is actually
just a lead plug.

Normal opening of the backplate might presumably
pull the copper wire out through the lead, tearing up the
lead seal in the process, but melt the lead and the wire
can be removed without the lead being torn up.

Printing some unique, hard to duplicate pattern
on the lead might be enough to fix that problem.

If something like this is right, it's not
necessarily a problem with the Shoup machines themselves
that was demonstrated.

But it is pretty clear in any case that it
should not be very easy to move the numbers
around on the dials, or whatever devices there are,
there in back, that register the votes.

All of this is pure guesswork, since I've never seen
the back of one of these lever machines, though I've
voted on them plenty of times.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

votes over his 2000 performance. See uselectionatlas.org for details.

This is not the original AP article, but the language (from ideamouth.com) is as I remember it:

...
New York

White Plains

The unofficial vote total, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, gave State Senate Candidate Spano (R) a lead of 1,674 votes. He had 54,120 votes, or 51 percent, to Stewart-Cousins' (D) 52,446 votes, or 49 percent. After the first hours of a two-week vote recount, Democrats claimed Monday that their candidate for the state Senate from Yonkers had wiped out almost all of her unofficial deficit and moved within 288 votes of the powerful Republican incumbent, Nicholas Spano. The county Board of Elections disclosed Friday that seals on 22 machines were damaged or missing. Jonathan Rosen, director of the state Democrats' campaign committee, said Democrats' election lawyer Berger told him that NEARLY EVERY MACHINE HAD A HIGHER COUNT FOR STEWART-COUSINS THAN WAS RECORDED. However, Spano also gained votes, including 80 from one machine, Rosen said. Nov 14 update: Stewart-Cousins (D) is now up 263 machine votes - meaning the machines were somehow off by roughly 2,000 votes.

(emphasis added)

...

I've read more recent opinions that state that the error was innocent. Doesn't seem likely. Ballots and machines are all impounded and there are issues being settled in court. Doesn't sound innocent.

An error of 2000 votes out of a total of 100,000 votes....2% error. 2% error!

Still looking for a Nov 9 AP article.....

From the Green Party of New York E-news in 2002....Spano appears to be connected to vote tampering in 2000.

...

The trial revealed that Anthony Mangone, a top political aide for Spano who was the senator's part-time counsel, had tampered with absentee votes during the 2000 Green Party campaign. He testified that Spano knew nothing about the scheme. Spano won all 26 absentee ballots to secure the Green Party line in the 2000 election.

...

But there was no fraud in 2004, right?

more at www.gpnys.org/enews/6_03_02ballotfraud.php

The Journal News has lots of articles on this senate race....digging these up costs money; they are achived already.

So if someone has the orinal AP stories from Nov 9 and Nov 10, they might be interesting and we would get the original language showing that nearly all machines had errors favoring the republican (who, as described above, is connected to 2000 vote tampering).

anyone else think that NY was one of the safe states used to pad Bush's lead

keep kicking it

That is such utter bullshit.

It's all a lie.

I did not know that and I have been following that issue fairly closely. Demonstates how easy it is to overllok!

of the Presidential votes also, since the state race you are discussing suggests more bad Republi-Nazi behavior with the vote tallies? Here in Tennessee, I've been told by my local election commission director that -- short of a court order -- he cannot even do any manual recounts of our paper ballots in select precincts for quality control checks of our new ES$S optical scanning equipment. That seems absurd to me, but I am getting the run-around also from my state Attorney General's office about the permissibility of "quality control" checks. I would expect that if it were possible in NY, someone should get on it right away with a cooperative county election commission official who would be happy to have help proving (or disproving) that the "system" worked.

Any of you New Yorkers pursued that opportunity yet? Would it be possible/doable now, at this critical junction in the "tipping" of this election theft investigation? BTW, it should be possible to recount about 1,800 ballots an hour/team (working with four person teams), in case you guys want to give this "quality control" process a try. With a cooperative election official, this might move us beyond statistics and speculation to hard evidence of election theft in a "deep blue" state.

Daily News

I think posting it in it's entirity is against DU rules. Any suggestions of how to get it up here? In parts? Or I can email it to whoever wants it.

... of the Presidential votes also, since the state race you are discussing suggests more bad Republi-Nazi behavior with the vote tallies? Here in Tennessee, I've been told by my local election commission director that -- short of a court order -- he cannot even do any manual recounts of our paper ballots in select precincts for quality control checks of our new ES$S optical scanning equipment. That seems absurd to me, but I am getting the run-around also from my state Attorney General's office about the permissibility of "quality control" checks. I would expect that if it were possible in NY, someone should get on it right away with a cooperative county election commission official who would be happy to have help proving (or disproving) that the "system" worked.

Any of you New Yorkers pursued that opportunity yet? Would it be possible/doable now, at this critical junction in the "tipping" of this election theft investigation? BTW, it should be possible to recount about 1,800 ballots an hour/team (working with four person teams), in case you guys want to give this "quality control" process a try. With a cooperative election official, this might move us beyond statistics and speculation to hard evidence of election theft in a "deep blue" state.

:kick: