- WASHINGTON - Few answers
have been given to explain why more than 1,800 votes in Miami-Dade County
were only found two days after Florida's primary election.
-
- The votes were found when election officials reviewed
four precincts with unusually low voter turnout Thursday. Many of those
additional votes would likely go to Janet Reno, who won Miami-Dade by more
than a 3-1 margin in the Democratic gubernatorial primary but trailed Bill
McBride statewide. The votes have not yet been submitted to the state as
part of Miami-Dade's vote total from Tuesday's primary.
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- McBride's unofficial victory margin was 8,196 votes,
according to the state, while Reno needed a difference of 6,751 votes or
less to qualify for an automatic machine recount.
-
- Reno would need to cut McBride's margin by 1,445 votes
to trigger the recount. The additional ballots from the four precincts
would probably reduce the difference by several hundred votes, based on
the margin of Reno's victory in Miami-Dade.
-
- Reno will not concede the race because of balloting problems
in her home county.
-
- One of the four precincts was at Pilgrim Rest Missionary
Baptist Church in Liberty City, with 1,633 registered voters. The first
count showed 87 votes cast there, but the review found more than 610 votes.
-
- "The first four (precincts) were just off the chart,"
said David Leahy, Miami-Dade's elections chief. "This is an indicator
that the system did not work as it was designed to."
-
- Leahy believes that in some cases poll workers failed
to close down the touchscreen voting machines properly, leading the votes
on those machines not to be collected Tuesday. But he added that it is
possible some of the polling stations' low vote numbers are correct, reflecting
delays and technical glitches that kept some machines from being used part
of the day.
-
- Dorothy Walton, precinct clerk at Pilgrim Rest church,
said she wasn't told the proper closing procedures for the machines.
- "I didn't know either that when they set them up,
they didn't hook them all together," said Walton.
-
- In her precinct, seven out of the 12 machines were working.
But just two were linked, so results were only collected from those machines,
she said.
-
- Jaqui Colyer, a Democratic candidate for state Representative,
also complained of voting problems in the precinct, which is in the district
she ran in.
-
- When elections officials first told her that less than
90 people voted in the precinct, she said she started calling her supporters.
When she had talked to about 100 who said they voted for her, she became
suspicious.
-
- But when officials announced Thursday they had found
610 votes, she became incensed. "Were they under the bed?" she
asked. "If they can lose 600 votes in that precinct, how many more
did they lose?" She also complained that long lines at the polls sent
home many potential voters.
-
- One supporter told her: "I had to go to work. I
love you Jaqui, but I don't love you enough to make a lifetime job out
of voting."
- ___
-
-
- Comment
-
- Amerika, Sieg Heil!
-
- By Richard Sauder, PhD
- dr_samizdat@hotmail.com
- Copyright 2002. All rights reserved.
- Contact author for permission to reprint or repost
- www.sauderzone.com
- 9-13-2
-
- I'm reflecting on the ugly train wreck of an "alleged"
election in Florida earlier this week (see the link below from the Miami
newspaper for details). Why even bother to vote? In South Florida it's
all "computerized". You just point your finger and press your
choice and it's all electronically tabulated.
-
- Not.
-
- http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/4063332.htm
-
- What could be simpler? and yet -- it is all so very
and unbelievably CORRUPT. The election supervisor in Miami, David Leahy,
does one thing and one thing only, and he does it spectacularly BADLY.
Multiply him many times over across the country. That's the sad state of
government in the United States today. A patently obvious sham and a fraud.
A hi-tech, computerized dictatorship where the computers are OBVIOUSLY
rigged.
-
- Why even vote? It's like buying a lottery ticket (but
at least with the lottery ticket there's a slim chance you'll get some
money). The process and the outcome are highly uncertain and probabilistic
in both cases-- and in both cases the fix is in, behind the scenes. What
more proof would any sane person require or want??!!
-
- I'm sure that something like this could never happen
in Chicago. They threw out half a million ballots there in the 2000 election,
but by 2004 I'm sure they'll have it down to, oh, say, a much more manageable
350,000 or 400,000!! I am also reminded of what happened in New Mexico
in 2000. They counted the vote three times. The first time Bush won. Then
they counted again and Al Gore won. So then they counted a third time and
Bush won for the second time!! Is Democracy neat, or what! If you just
keep counting the votes sooner or later the tally comes out just right!!
The system works!!! We need look no farther for evidence of that than Chicago,
or New Mexico, or South Florida-- or, well, just about any old place in
"The Great POPULAR Peoples' Republik of the U.S. of A."
-
- Is "Got mit uns", or what??!! I rest my case.
Heil Bush! Heil Ashcroft! Heil Rice and Cheney and Powell! Let's cluster
bomb the shit out of Iraq and show them Iraqi heathens how our God-fearing,
Lord Jesus Christ-loving country promotes Democracy and our time-honored,
priceless Judeo-Christian ideals and principles, at home and abroad!! Someone
has to promote the great cultural and imperial legacy of our Graeco-Roman
forebears. And history in its infinite wisdom has bestowed that great calling
on the U.S. of f***in, A.! Damn right!
-
- Amerika, Sieg Heil!
-
- It all just makes a man want to rush right out and register
to vote ASAP and jump into one of them there new-fangled election machines
and just vote the bejeezus out of a freshly-digitized, modern style, All-American
ballot!
-
- Huwa! Semper Fi! Huwa-HOOO!!
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