Ohio, and Larimer (RE: and right here in Boulder)

["Jan Kok" <kok@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Some Guy [mailto:someguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> Well here we are, two days past the election and only 53.5% of the
ballots
> in the county have been tallied. 75 of the 227 precincts.
> 
> We asked for paper ballots, and we got it. We also got slow, but I am
okay
> with that. I think that we should have expected that. I've heard that
the
> first election done with the DataVote system in the 1970s also was
slow.

The mother of a colleague of mine is a newspaper reporter in Ohio, who
covered the voting centers on Tuesday.  What I heard from him was:

1.  Some of the people waited in line until 3AM Wednesday to vote,
because the TOUCH SCREEN VOTING MACHINES were malfunctioning.  I suppose
that was mainly in the larger voting centers which would be in the
cities, which tend to be more Democratic leaning.

2.  The voting centers were turning voters away rather than giving them
provisional ballots until 3PM Tuesday when a judge ordered the voting
centers to issue provisional ballots.  As you have probably heard, the
Dems say that the provisional ballots would be mostly Democrat votes.
Since they weren't issuing provisional ballots until 3PM, there could
easily have been twice as many provisional ballots as they actually
issued, which could have switched Ohio to Kerry!

> Anyone concerned with what's going on here in Boulder County? I
haven't
> seen
> any comments on this list about that.
> 
> Any ventures to guess why; or talk about if BC has experienced
> malfunctions;
> or problems with the humans; or much else.
> 
> I've only been perturbed by the Daily Camera's predictions used as
factual
> material. They've predicted the outcome and stated it as fact back
when
> only
> 26.8% of the Boulder County vote was in. The other newspapers were
more
> careful and told their readers that the bottom line wasn't too sure on
> Wednesday morning.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone knew what had happened in Grand County?
> Yesterday
> morning they still hadn't reported any figures. Did the ghost of
Marvin
> Heemeyer drive the phantom bulldozer through the virtual voting booth?
> 
> Any signs of stupid polling tricks here in Colorado? This is
> ColoradoVoter.net So I'm wondering with all of the watchers that were
> watching in Colorado if any of them saw anything that looked odd?
> Were the watchers trained to know fraud if they saw it? Or were they
just
> looking for polling place irregularities? There certainly were enough
of
> those, and many incidents right here in our county.

I worked as a troubleshooter at one of the voting centers in Larimer
County.  This was my first time helping with an election.  I got about 3
hours of training and a 90-page manual plus a bunch of sample forms.

We all made some errors, for example forgetting to fill out certain
fields, checking certain things, and so on.  I didn't see anything that
looked like deliberate fraud.  We had 2214 ballots processed through the
Diebold Accuvote optical scanner, and we collected somewhere around 100
provisional ballots.  There were about 20 people lined up when we opened
the doors at 7AM.  The longest lines were about 10:30AM, and the
bottleneck was probably people taking their time to fill out the long
ballots, or it may have been some slowness at the ballot table.  We were
expecting the heaviest traffic 7-9, 11-1 and 5-7.  After the crush at
10:30, we were bracing for a deluge.  But the expected peak times turned
out to be relatively quiet.  And at 7PM there were just a few voters
still filling out their ballots.

I was constantly busy from 6AM until about 10:30PM, answering the other
workers questions (calling in to the election office to get some of the
answers), or just helping to direct traffic or take peoples places when
they took breaks.  I also spent about 5 hours the previous day helping
to get everything set up.  But it was also a lot of fun to do something
completely different from my usual work (engineering).  I'll probably do
something similar next year.

We had one watcher in the morning and one in the afternoon, both from
the Republican party.  Both just sat at a table and counted the number
of voters passing through.  They looked extremely bored.  I didn't see
anyone but voters in the parking lot.  A reporter from the Loveland
Reporter-Herald came in and wanted to talk to the supervisor, but it was
a busy time, and so he left.  A couple of cops came in together and just
looked around and went back out, twice during the day.

> Just wondering if any one here on this list has a care about what has
> occurred in Boulder County. Maybe y'all are sure that things have gone
> just
> fine, or have resigned yourselves to believing that it was all screwed
and
> there's nothing to be done about it.
> 
> Of the 64 Colorado counties, in Boulder the ballots are still being
> tallied.
> Everyone else is done and have been for a while.
> I can't believe that the CVV and CFVI groups are so quiet about
Boulder.
> Or
> maybe just not well informed.
> 
> Some Guy who is just wondering

Maybe everyone is exhausted and wants to take a few days vacation from
politics and elections.  I know I do!

Cheers,
- Jan