GOP will steal another election if we don't stop them

By Libby Spencer

Once again, here we are at the 11th hour and it's becomes increasingly clear that our biggest problem is not the polling but rather the polls, meaning the ballot box. Early races are turning up disturbing problems with the voting machines that remain unresolved eight years after the debacle of 2000.

Palm Beach County held an election on August 26. One of the races for judge ended up extremely close, only 60 votes separated two candidates. As election officials began preparations for a recount, they found that 3,500 ballots were missing.

Rumors abounded that the ballots ended up in a landfill. Assistant County Administrator Brad Merriman, who was investigating the missing ballots, found them at the vote-tabulating center.

A somewhat proud-sounding Merriman reported, “The ballots were found in this room, not in garbage bags, not in the trunks of cars.”

Some of the uncounted votes came from an electronic cartridge on a voting machine. The votes were counted but were never transferred to the tabulating center.

These are not Diebolds. This is the Sequoia Voting Systems, the other major machine in use across the country. And this is not the only anomaly that's turned up in just the past week. Brad blog pointed to this WaPo report yesterday.

D.C. election officials blamed a defective computer memory cartridge yesterday for producing what appeared to be thousands of write-in votes that officials say did not exist.

The glitch caused initially inaccurate results in several contests, including two high-profile council races, ...

Those answers were still in short supply yesterday, although the board said the confusion did not change the outcomes of the contests. They included the defeat of longtime Republican council member Carol Schwartz.

The episode has sparked uncertainty over whether the board, after apparently botching a routine local primary that drew about 13 percent of registered voters, can handle the general election in November. Officials expect the presidential race to drive a record number of voters to the polls.

I'd like to know how they can be so sure that the glitch didn't affect the outcome and who were the mysterious write-in votes for anyway? The piece doesn't say. One thing is clear though. The problems are unlikely to be resolved before November.

So the question is, what are we going to do if the GOP steal another election? And is it too late to raise a demand for paper ballots? I know that's not perfect either, but at least there's a little more transparency.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)