Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Politics We Will Never Know Who Won Yarbro-Henry Race
Posted by Jeff Woods on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 7:27 AM
With representatives of each candidate watching over their shoulders, election officials will do a recount of the Yarbro-Henry state Senate primary election this afternoon. This result is supposed to satisfy everyone and make our hearts swell with patriotic pride. We will have witnessed a great triumph of democracy right here in our own backyard. Gail Kerr is already gushing about it. Not so fast.
Actually, only a couple hundred absentee ballots will be recounted. As for the rest of the 11,400 votes, fuggedaboutit. Davidson County is one of 93 Tennessee counties that use voting machines with no paper trail to verify results.
With great fanfare in 2008, Republicans and Democrats alike embraced the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act to eliminate the notorious hazards of paperless, unverified electronic voting. This law called for replacing these machines by this year's elections with paper ballots to be marked by voters and then read by optical scanners—a system allowing for recounts and audits of the actual tallies.
What happened? Republicans took control of the legislature and voted to delay this obvious good-government election reform. They were placating county election officials who were whining about having to go to the trouble of implementing the change.
"They can't recount the machines. All they can do with the machines is press the tally button and get the same tally. There's nothing tangible that they can recount," says election reform advocate Mary Mancini of Tennessee Citizen Action.
So we can't ever know who really won this election between Jeff Yarbro and Douglas Henry because we can't ever really have a recount under this system. Too bad.
Comments (14)
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Don't forget the "why." As in, "why simply pressing the tally button to recount the machines is bad." The machines don't work properly.
On August 5th, in Maury County:
"After polls closed Thursday and precincts [updates] started pouring in, vote totals began to evaporate, with some candidates losing as many as 50 votes.
The glitch was pointed out to election officials by a Daily Herald reporter and a recount had to be taken. When that didn’t work, Baxter had to call the software vendor to fix the problem. Forty-five minutes later, the problem was resolved."
On August 5th, in Hawkins County:
"Elections Coordinator Patricia Lumpkins said that after the final results are released, she matches the precinct readouts with the final tallies. Upon double checking the results early Friday morning, Lumpkins discovered the PEB reader in Rogersville had counted all votes twice in five precincts — three in District 4 and two in District 7. "
ES&S' iVotronic Touch Screen Voting System is a poll worker-activated, portable, multilingual touchscreen system that records votes on internal flash memory. A poll worker uses a device called a Personal Electronic Ballot (PEB; pictured above at left) to turn the machine on and enable voting. Voters choose their ballot language and then make their selections using a touchscreehttp://www.nashvillescene.com/pitw/archives/2010/08/24/we-will-never-know-who-won-yarbro-henry-racen, much in the same way that modern ATMs work. When the polls close, poll workers move summary data from each machine onto the PEB. The PEBs are then transported to election headquarters or their contents transmitted via a computer network."
Gosh. I thought it was Tre Hargett who stamped his little feet and told the legislature, "Hell no. I won't go (along with paper ballots.)"
This is such a fucking outrage. Really, Terrence, if I thought about it tonight I probably wouldn't sleep. So so easy to rig an election this way. Poof! Ooops! All gone!
I suppose one would rather have hanging chads and incoherent markings on a paper ballot than the sure result from the computers.
I saw those paper absentee ballots and they are not easy to decipher. Although most are marked as instructed, some require a good guess, others must be omitted.
This election is like all others, not perfect, but better than Russia or Venezuela.
How can you be sure that the results from the computers are "sure" results? Please refer to incidents in Hawkins and Maury Counties mentioned above before you answer.
"It is difficult to convince a man (or woman) of something if their salary (or winning our elections) depend on their not understanding it." (Thanks to HL Mencken)
The problems with unverifiable voting equipment are predictable and were predicted. They are slower, more costly and completely unsafe. Those seem to be the features that TN Republicans are working to maintain these days.
I will always wonder just why almost all Republican legislators voted for the TN Voter Confidence Act in 2008, and then (when they won our legislature against all odds and logic) they promptly announced that repealing (or delaying) the law would be one of their three priorities in the upcoming legislative session. Perchance did Repubs know that they would win EVERY open seat that year in order to take control of the legislature, so their being for the TVCA before they were agin' it would have no negative consequences (like elections that can, you know, actually be verified.)
Yes, it would be nice to know just how long our TN elections have been hacked and altered through the cooperation of the very reich-wing owners of these unverifable voting machines. It would be nice to know, but (as they are quite aware of and thankful for) there is no way to know.
Hell of a way to run a democracy, where the only legitimacy is the consent of the governed. Heck of a job, Repubs -- gaining an undetectable advantage in our elections while losing your soul. Mission accomplished.
We need a USDOJ investigation here in Tennessee NOW. If Memphis is now a red city (something their voting machines would want us to believe), then Elvis still drives a catfish truck and Beale Street belongs in Beverly Hills. We all know better, but the Repubs seem to have learned another lesson well from Joseph Goebbels (the Nazi propagandist):
"If you tell a lie that is big enough and you keep telling it, eventually people will begin to believe it."
Witness us, now and in November, for evidence of that statement.
Mary, is your organization planning any protests or demonstrations in Nashville regarding TVCA (or the lack in implementation thereof)? If so, please let us know how we can support this cause, (you know, aside from vowing to vote out the incumbents). Thanks!
To say we will really never know the outcome of this race is true- but not only for the reason(s) cited. I happened to vote for one of the Democratic candidates because I live in the district, because I voted in the Democratic party primary (this time) and because it was a contested election.
Not all candidates in the Democratic party primary faced opposition. In those instances, I "fixed" that with a write-in vote.
But had I exercised my write-in right in the Henry-Yarbro race, if I could not choose between the two (or if another 21st District voter or two or three, in fact, cast a write-in ballot ), this/these vote(s) would not be counted, let alone recounted.
Next-day election recaps always used to include votes for Hoda Kotb, Mickey Mouse, Young Buck or whomever, because the election commission, in crunching the numbers, gave complete stats to the newspapers.
When no one was looking the law was changed and, as a result, a very vital aspect of democracy- the protest vote- is no longer officially recognized in Davidson County.
Stacy Harris
Publisher/Editor/Media Critic
Stacy's Music Row Report
http://stacyharris.com/mediawatchdog.html
Yes, Mary, please tell us all about your new group. While you're at it, please let us know what happened to the other groups and "projects" you've been involved in for the past year.
Inquiring (i.e., non-professional leftist) minds want to know.
BTW, I do look forward to your new book.
Stacy,
FYI: The write-in votes in the 21st District Democratic primary were, in fact, pointed out by election officials during the recount yesterday. But since the Democratic Party had requested the recount and since they were only interested in who had won the primary, there was no reason for the election officials (or those of us who were there to observe) to re-count and and announce the names of each write-in candidate (by the way, I don't recall any write-in candidate getting more than one vote.)
I guess the best answer to your implicit question about the counting of write-in votes is that the primaries are controlled by the parties and the parties have no interest in paying the county election commission to re-count write-in votes unless that could affect the outcome. In the general election, there may be a different procedure.
That's such a miss by Jeff Woods, it's surprising for me. The lines from Gail Kerr seemed better, it appears.
I don't know if I've seen so many of ads for such race for Doug Henry or anything close. The good news is the bigger, better answer from Yarbro. Maybe something else worked there, but it finally seems calmer, and sounds much better there.
I wonder if we would be hearing all these renewed clamors for paper ballots (paper? Isn't is the 21st century now?) if Henry had lost? Not to overstate the obvious, but I think Yarbro is more ideologically aligned with the folks on these fine pages than Henry is.
I think paper ballots are great, they would be verifiable, but then what happens when a whole bunch of extra ballots pop up somewhere, all punched for one candidate? What are we going to do then? Just curious...
Let's make this simple for you, WIAT. Let's do what most other countries do:
Build a plexiglass ballot box.
Seal it and place it in the polling place where everyone can see it.
Have voters put their completed ballots in the sealed plexiglass box.
At the end of election day, open the sealed plexiglass box and count
only the ballots that were in that box. (Personally, I would like to
deputize high school Honor Society members to be the vote-counters.)
Count (and re-count, if necessary) the ballots in front of God and everyone else.
Announce the results at the polling place (again, an Honor Society member
should do the announcing) and post the results there for everyone to see.
Put the counted ballots back in the plexiglass box and reseal it.
The ballots could be printed by any competent printing company in the county.
The cost of counting the votes would be pizza and soft drinks for the teenage counters.
No muss, no fuss --- and no unverifiable, secret, expensive, proprietary vote-counting software.
How's that for a Norman Rockwell moment in American democracy. (Works for me.)
