The Command Post
2004 US Presidential Election
November 06, 2004
Irregularities | Irregularities roundup

Warren County, Ohio:

Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio’s returns…

James Lee, spokesman with the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office in Columbus, said Thursday he hasn’t heard of any situations similar to Warren County’s building restrictions. He said general security concerns are decided at the local levels.

Other counties, such as Butler County, let people watch ballot checkers through a window.

Typically, the Warren County commissioners’ room is set up as a gathering place for people to watch the votes come in. But that wasn’t done this year…

Warren appears to be a largely rural county with no large towns located between Cincinnati and Dayton. 2000 population: 158,383. In 2002 there were 101,207 registered voters, 50% of whom voted in 2002. In 2004, 91,922 voters went 72% Bush, 27% Kerry.

LaPorte, Indiana:

The day after a two-and-a-half-hour delay in counting ballots due to a glitch in a computer program, LaPorte County election officials are still trying to figure out what happened. “Maybe there was a power surge,” LaPorte County Clerk Lynne Spevak said. “Something zapped it.” At about 7 p.m. Tuesday, it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are actually more than 79,000 registered voters… […the patch from Election Systems and Software didn’t work, they might have to manually input the information…]

Craven County, North Carolina: Election problems due to a software glitch:

A systems software glitch in Craven County’s electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that, when corrected, changed the outcome of at least one race in Tuesday’s election. Then, in the rush to make right the miscalculation that swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast, a human mistake further delayed accurate totals for the 40,534 who voted… The Elections Systems and Software equipment had downloaded voting information from nine of the county’s 26 precincts and as the absentee ballots were added, the precinct totals were added a second time…

South Florida OKs Slot Machines Proposal:

A proposal that would let voters decide whether to allow slot machines at race tracks and jai alai frontons in South Florida won approval after elections officials discovered thousands of absentee votes missed in an electronic tally on Election Day.

The vast majority of the 79,000 absentee ballots added late in Broward County approved the initiative Thursday. That made all the difference in the outcome, swamping the narrow lead that opponents had clung to since Tuesday.

State and local elections officials said the ballot oversight was due to human error in computer programming, not a technical glitch. A leader of No Casinos said opponents would ask Broward County for a re-count anyway, but Secretary of State Glenda Hood said that wasn’t possible under state law…

See also Palm Beach County Logs 88,000 More Votes Than Voters

And, this chart shows the (unconfirmed) differences between the numbers of votes cast for president and the total turnout for each Florida county.

The county-by-county Florida results are analyzed statistically here.



Posted by Lonewacko at November 6, 2004 02:11 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Data mining sure is a fascinating subject. Kinda like Ouija boards and table tilting.

Posted by: CERDIP [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 7, 2004 10:49 AM

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