Jefferson County Voters Continue To Raise Concerns About Voting Machines

Early voting for the November election started Monday, and during this first week of it, Jefferson County has experienced high turnout. By the end of Saturday, which was the sixth day of early voting, the Jefferson County Clerk's office was reporting that 7,416 had cast ballots.
When you add the number of absentee ballots mailed in, turnout stands at 7,774 voters.
Rogers Park (2,200 voters) and the Nederland Recreation Center (1,673 voters) have seen the most voters of all the nine early voting sites in the county.

Early voting runs through Friday, November 3rd. KFDM continues to get complaints from Jefferson County voters who say the electronic voting machines are not registering their votes correctly.
Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket.
Some of those voters including Lamar University professor, Dr. Bruce Drury, believe the problem is a programming error.

Saturday, KFDM spoke to another voter who says it's not just happening with straight ticket voting, he says it's happening on individual races as well, Jerry Stopher told us when he voted for a Democrat, the Republican's name was highlighted.
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http://kfdm.com/engine.pl?station=kfdm&id=17343&template=breakout_dayportvideo.shtml&dateformat=%M+%e,%Y


Yet more "glitches" which are converting Dem votes to repub. :eyes:

Jefferson County is also a fairly strong Dem county in the state, so it's no surprise that these voting machines have caused problems from day one.

employ?

these machines will keep giving everyone fits if they aren't calibrated and maintained. it's the hanging chads all over again, which was caused by no one emptying the chad scrap receptacles in the months between the elections.

call the county clerk, show up at the county commissioners meetings and demand the elections office not be treated like the red headed step child of county government

someone working election protection and get some help keeping an eye out?

K&R

It seems to me that anyone with the expertise to change the programming on the voting machine to tally Repuke votes that were actually Dem votes would be able to have the screen show the Dem vote - but the vote totals inside the memory would be changed to Repuke - not on the screen where the voter could see it.

If the voter could see the error - that would alert officials to the problem which would defeat the purpose of the illicit programming.

Seems just like terrible quality control and verification on the machines and software to me.

And look, we really don't know exactly what the machine appeared to do, however...

I'm guessing a deeper level of knowledge to get the machine to read one way, yet record another.

But by playing with (or screwing up) the Ballot Definition File a condition could be set up where what seems to have occurred really would.

I don't think one could get this effect by tinkering with a Ballot Definition File, because that would presumably flip all voters' votes or none.

But I sure am out of my comfort zone declaring what this obviously does or doesn't mean. My opinions are more like guesses.

But manipulating the "Straight Party" feature in the BDF would, I believe, open one up to the problems described...assuming, perhaps that the "flipping" was witnessed on the summary screen.

I would add that to this sub-thread of yours.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=455194&mesg_id=455695

This is the fourth report I've seen on people pressing one candidate and getting another which DIDN'T give the name of the company.

Dos Centavos has another link to the video in this post. Jefferson County has experienced extensive e-voting problems, going back to the primary in April.

Jefferson County is predominantly Democratic (strong unions, long history of Yellow Dog Democrats). John Kerry carried Jeff County in 2004, but they were still using paper ballots then. Carolyn Guidry, county clerk and supervisor of elections, is a Democrat but steadfastly maintains a defense of the technology's issues, blaming the voters for long fingernails causing their votes to switch from Republican to Democratic. (Really. Watch the video). She has refused calls to resign.

She initially fought against these machines and was pretty critical of the County Commissioners for purchasing them. They've all said that they are between a rock and a hard place, since these machines (or similar) were required to be in place by this past primary. I guess we have to do something about all of them, but I'd rather we focus on the top of the food chain and get the people who are actually forcing these machines on us. We never had such widescale problems with the scantron type ballot and #2 pencils.

Though I'll give you that her fingernail explanation was ridiculous.


And having discussed politics with Dr. Drury on numerous occasions, and I wouldn't be surprised if he actually said they were *intentional* programming errors. :)

None of who seem to give one shit about any of this. :eyes: I'm tired of the behind the back looks they shoot each other when I bring up election irregularities. I've taken to calling it that over 'fraud' cuz they totally shut down when I use that word. What the fuck is wrong with people?

Lou Dobbs should get this too. Will send his way when I get to work.

Thanks for posting!

k&r

Though I wouldn't be surprised if these kinds of problems also show up in Jeff Cty, CO if they have the ES&S machines too! It's still good to let them know what's happening in the world. :)

Made assumptions!

Thanks for telling me before I sent it! ;)

There are many Jefferson counties.

Texas? right?

NT