Posted by
Always To The Right on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 2:50:02 PM
Davis wants to paint all questions about the tabulation and transmission process as a belief in little green men. Did Davis treat them so cavalierly in
2000, when Florida had didn’t have troubles in reporting its vote? I
don’t recall Lanny Davis sitting quietly, laughing at Democratic
objections to ballots designed by Democrats and invoking Marvin the
Martian on national television.
The allegation that all of these changes fall within the statistical
expectations of error is simply erroneous. As John points out, that
would require the changes to exhibit roughly the same characteristics
as the total vote itself. Instead, all of the “corrections” went
inexorably in one direction. How likely is it in a 42/42/18 race that
100% of the changes favor one candidate?
Given the failures that we’ve already seen — including a massive failure
in county that holds almost 25% of Minnesota’s population — it doesn’t
take a faith in little green men to wonder whether we’re seeing a
corruption of the process.
The story of Hennepin County and the election continues its curious
path today with a new revelation about the transmission process. Yesterday,
I spoke with an election judge in Hennepin County who told me that the
modems in ballot-counting machines was known to county elections
officials four days prior to the election. Today, in speaking with an
official involved in the elections process in the county, I not only
confirmed that none of the machines in Hennepin County could
electronically transmit their results, but that county officials knew
about the failure eleven days in advance.
Minnesota uses an optical-scan balloting system that makes the
entire process more secure. Not only does this allow for voters to
catch unusable ballots before they leave as well as to automate the
counting process, it removes human error from the vote reporting to
county election centers. The counties of Minnesota spent a lot of
money on these systems and explicitly selected the modem option for
that purpose.
The machines have wireless modems that have to be pre-programmed
with a specific IP address to securely transmit those results directly
to the election centers. For some reason, the machines had the wrong
IP address entered on the cards. The cards would have needed to be
reprogrammed to correct the error, and with a few hundred precincts in
Hennepin (which includes Minneapolis), that would have taken a
significant effort. However, with eleven days to accomplish this, the failure to take corrective action for a national election is mystifying. The source to whom I spoke said that county officials were aware of this by October 23rd in a meeting with elections officials, and possibly earlier.
Why would Hennepin County refuse to correct such a fundamental
failure of the elections process eleven days ahead of what everyone
expected to be a close Senate race, let alone a presidential election?
To answer this, I spoke with Michelle Desjardin, the elections manager
for Hennepin County. She said that the county did know of the failure
at about October 23rd, but that they didn’t have enough time to
reprogram the 860+ memory cards and meet statutory deadlines for public
testing — seven days in advance of the elections.
But here’s the strange part. Desjardin confirmed that the
electronic transmission system worked in the primaries. The cards did
not get reprogrammed, and the destination IP address did not change from the primaries. There was no reason why the transmission cards should have required reprogramming at all.
Desjardin acknowledged that the failure of all 860+ machines to connect
was a mystery, but that they have higher priority statutory deadlines
to meet before they can begin investigating the failure.
Another question arises from this. Why didn’t the county test this
system in time to make those changes? The entire point of testing is
to find broken processes and correct them in time for the election.
Desjardin also told me that the county provided written procedures
to the cities as a work-around to the transmission process. The cities
were responsible for sending the written instructions to the
precincts. Hennepin County could not confirm that any or all of the
precincts received them, but Desjardin confirmed that each city did.
I also contacted the Secretary of State’s office and spoke with the
Director of Governmental Affairs, Beth Fraser. Fraser explained that
Hennepin County is responsible for managing the elections process in
their jurisdiction. On the issue of custody, Beth said that the rules
vary depending on whether the ballots get counted in the precinct or in
the county election centers. In the latter case, it requires two
judges at all times to carry the ballots back to the election center.
However, if ballots are counted, sealed, and signed by the judges in
the precincts (using the optical-scan counter), the state only requires
one person to have custody in transporting the ballots. Therefore,
nothing untoward happened in that process.
Hopefully, our local media will start asking why a crucial safeguard
to the election process was knowingly allowed to fail, and what caused
that failure. Minnesotans spend a lot of money on their elections, and
the most populous county in the state should have performed better than
it did.