A fellow integrity activist forward this a few days ago: It happens all the time: Interview with the consultant who discovered the Medford miscount <read>
Wow,” I replied. “If I’d discovered such a major error, I’d surely remember it!”
“Oh, this kind of thing happens all the time,” he said. “The details are always different, but there’s an endless number of ways the people who run our elections can botch them up. Every election has something.”
I glanced at my prepared questions and slid them into the wastebasket. Lordamighty, the guy who makes his living working with election records doesn’t even remember what I had considered a jaw-dropping discovery! Fortunately, I didn’t need to come up with new questions; Grebner was eager to talk.
“You want stories? I can tell you lots of stories.” he continued. “Everybody finds different ways not to follow the instructions.”
You read the post for a bunch of stories of election mess-ups recalled by one consultant. We just want to remind our readers and ourselves of some similar error discovered in Connecticut – what worries us are not those that are surfaced in time to correct results, or the ones surfaced eventually that did not change the results – its the ones never discovered or covered up. I wish we could say for sure “It doesn’t happen all the time.” We do not know for sure, its one of those unknowns, but from what we do know of those surfaced, our bet is that it is much more likely “that it happens frequently in Connecticut, say at least once or twice every statewide Election and Primary. More likely than not in our guesstimate”
Here are some of our posts of past errors surfaced in Connecticut and around the country, a selection from our over 900 posts:
Dan Rather Reports, was it really inadvertent hanging chads in FL 2000, a gross error, or intentional? <Aug 2007>
A New Britain Candidate’s company moving voting machines…not a great formula for confidence in our elections <Nov 2007>
A pretty obvious problem in accurate hand counting when no actual planning is involved <Nov 2007> Would we trust these people with petty cash? We trust them with our Democracy!
Half of Registrars Follow Last Minute Procedures <Jan 2008>
We won’t find many problems where there is a Blind Faith In our Scanners <Feb 2008>
Paper ballots useful, only if you don’t lose them <Jun 2008>
Gov loses election by fraud. Nice to know, but a lot better if the loser was not jailed <Apr 2008> He is still in jail. Pardon our upset and the Governor.
New Milford did not compute <Jun 2008>
It also helps confidence and integrity if the number of voters and votes is close (a Bridgeport preview of 2010?) <Jun 2008>
We will stop here, covering the 1st year of CTVotersCount. Perhaps we will continue this review soon.
