Not your typical politician

Rep Kennedy is still a dick

He asks her to give him a list - "specifics" - and stops her by saying, "I get the idea."

If he just wanted 'the idea", why ask for a list?  Asshole.  

"Is that all?"  "What else?"  Sarcastically. He thought he had her, but she had more.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bad move, Stacey

I guess she really wants that VP spot.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

When the counting stops

Nearly 3,000 votes effectively disappeared during the machine recount of Florida’s midterm races, according to election records, calling into question whether officials relied on a flawed process to settle the outcome of three statewide contests.

[...]

In one of the most serious cases, Palm Beach County found “dozens of precincts missing a significant number” of votes during the machine recount, according to the supervisor of elections, Susan Bucher, causing the county to conclude that entire boxes of ballots may not have been counted.

Ms. Bucher blamed an overheated and outdated ballot-scanning machine. But the manufacturer of the high-speed scanner used in Palm Beach said its technicians had witnessed Palm Beach County elections workers, apparently worried that one of the machines was running too fast, jam a paper clip into the scanner’s “enter” button in an effort to slow it down. That, in turn, caused a short circuit that cut off the power, a company spokeswoman said.

  NYT

Are they just extra stupid in Florida's election system, or is this part of the Florida way?

So serious were the problems that the county was unable to complete its machine recount on time and its results were not included in the state vote totals on Thursday. Whatever discrepancies it had were not part of the nearly 3,000 votes missing in the machine recount total.

Two power failures in Hillsborough County appear to have caused the recount there to come up nearly 850 votes short of the original tally, local officials said. Rather than submit numbers he knew were incorrect, the elections supervisor said he had scrapped the results. Miami-Dade County was short about 500 votes, state records show.

[...]

Florida is scheduled to certify results in the races for governor, Senate and agriculture commissioner on Nov. 20. All three races went to an automatic machine recount last week when the results of an initial tally, reported Nov. 10, showed that their margins fell within 0.5 percentage points. After that, a manual recount was ordered in the Senate and agriculture races when the machine recount showed the margins were less than 0.25 percentage points.

It was in the total results reported from the initial tally on Nov. 10 and the results of the machine recount reported on Saturday that the discrepancies in the total number of votes showed up.

The difference in Broward County was 0.29 percent — higher than the margin between the candidates in both the Senate and agriculture commissioner’s races.

“This is a big deal,” said E. John Sebes, founder of Open Source Election Technology, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that promotes accuracy and security in the vote-counting process. “If you have an election margin of 0.21 percent and a variance of 0.12 percent, the variance of your machine count is half the margin you are trying to correct. That’s kooky.”

It wasn’t only missing votes that raised questions about Florida’s election results. The vote count in heavily Democratic Broward County increased by about 80,000 in the four days after the election, possibly because of mail-in, provisional, overseas and military ballots that come in late and were legally counted after Election Day.

[...]

Noteworthy to outside election experts were the variances in vote tallies, which effectively meant that thousands of votes weren’t counted.

“If I were a campaign, I’d be yelling and screaming,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the Election Data and Science Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I’d want a hand recount of every single ballot.”

And if Al Gore had done that in 2000 instead of letting George W Bush and the Supreme Court steal that election, we might have a very different world today. He let the whole world down.

“Florida tried to clean up its act [after the 2000 debacle], and this was the first time it was put to the test,” Mr. Stewart said. “I would hope wiser heads in Florida would take a deep breath and say, ‘O.K., we can do better next time.’”

Do they have wiser heads?

When the machine recount in Hillsborough County came up 846 votes short of the number originally counted, Craig Latimer, the supervisor of elections, said he tossed the results of the machine recount and let the original tally stand.

“Even though we achieved 99.84 percent success in our recount effort, we are not willing to accept that votes go unreported,” Mr. Latimer said in a statement.

Uhhhh...no possibility it went the other way? Too many ballots cast the first time? Or, how about, HEY, there's a bunch of ballots missing! Nope. Just scrap it.

He stressed that the margin between the candidates had remained constant, even with the missing votes.

Sure, why not?

In Broward County, an elections official said that 2,000 ballots had been “co-mingled.”

“We did not correctly handle the ballots,” said Joseph D’Alessandro, head of operations there. “We are going to look into that and see what took place.”

Miami-Dade did not return a request for comment.

There's the wise heads.

In Palm Beach, the elections supervisor, Ms. Bucher, said the count was eventually reconciled, but it did not matter: The county missed the deadline to submit its numbers. She blamed the machine used, which she said overheated, and she disputed the manufacturer’s account that no technicians had been called about what she said had been an overheating problem.

“We have no reports of an overheating system that night,” said Kay Stimson, vice president of government affairs for Dominion Voting, one of two companies certified to provide the ballot counting machines in Florida. “The motors shipped there to be on hand are still in the box.”

Teresa Paulsen, spokeswoman for ES & S, the other company, said machine recounts depend on the same number of ballots being entered into the system. Some ballots could have been torn or damaged after the election, which could have cause a different result in the recount, she said.

The machines that were used in the recount are normally used to count absentee ballots. The machines at the precincts used on election night are more accurate, Mr. Stewart said.

[...]

“A close recount is going to expose all the warts you have in election system,” [Michael McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida] said. “It’s an election administrator’s prayer to not have a close election, so those warts are not revealed.”

How would we feel if our accountants took this very lax and arbitrary attitude?

Barry Richard, a lawyer for Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor who came within 33,000 votes after the machine recount in his race against the former Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis, said the amount of lost votes would not have been enough for his candidate to win.

“What it tells us is, these machines are not perfect,” Mr. Richard said. “We know people are not perfect. We particularly know that people in Broward are not perfect.”

I think it's pretty screwy that in national elections, various states can use various voting methods and have various rules. Although these were state results, there needs to be a standard method for the vote every four years, so why not just have a standard method? Which states have the least problematic elctions? That could give us a pattern. Or, perhaps it's time to go back to paper ballots, dump the machines, and not be in such a damned hurry to find out who won.

Meanwhile, in Georgia...

Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams has vowed to sue the [...] state of Georgia for "gross mismanagement" of the gubernatorial election after withdrawing from the race.

Abrams, who aimed to become the country's first black woman governor, on Friday acknowledged at a news conference that she had lost an election to Republican Brian Kemp, accusing him of voter suppression.

"Let be clear, this is not a speech of concession because concession means to acknowledge an action is right true or proper ... I cannot concede that," she said.

[...]

Kemp's victory is an important marker for Republicans ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Kemp's narrow margin already suggests that Georgia, a state Trump won by five percentage points in 2016, could be a genuine battleground in two years.

  alJazeera

Which means they'll have to double down on voter suppression.

Meanwhile in Georgia and Florida

The state Democratic Party on Sunday filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to tell counties they must count ballots rejected for what the party says were “arbitrary reasons.”

[...]

Last night, the state elections board instructed acting Secretary of State Robyn Crittenden to instruct all Georgia counties on how to process mailed-in ballots. What those instructions were we don’t know.

In the Seventh District, Democrat Carolyn Bordeaux’s campaign has filed a lawsuit in federal court asking that Gwinnett County delay certification of votes because the county has some 1,000 absentee votes that haven’t been counted.

In other words, a certain amount of messiness is implied in close elections.

[...]

We can rule out some motives [for Brian Kemp's desperate attempts to stop the ballot counting]. As the Florida governor’s contest has reminded us, concessions are not binding. They are political statements, not legal ones.

Nor, we hope, is this about Kemp wanting to be addressed as “governor-elect” in the media for the next eight weeks. If he’s due the title, that will come soon enough.

We can also rule out that the Kemp campaign is actually trying to pressure Abrams to do something she’s not inclined to do. A campaign that implies that a female African-American opponent is consorting with an armed “Black Panther Party” only 24 hours before Election Day can’t seriously believe it has increased its persuasive hold on her a week later.

But Kemp’s hostility does have much to do with Stacey Abrams and whether she continues as a cause celebre among Democrats.

There is the longer-term threat she might pose to U.S. Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., who is up for re-election in 2020.

But more immediately, there’s the question of whether Abrams and her turnout machine can dispense with a Democratic jinx and help John Barrow win his statewide Dec. 4 runoff against Republican Brad Raffensperger.

Clearly, Abrams recognizes the importance of controlling the office of secretary of state.

[...]

Kemp’s not trying to persuade Abrams to concede. He’s trying to make sure that his own people don’t stand down -- and that hers do.

Over the weekend, former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich was critical of the way Republican Brian Kemp ran his race for governor.

[...]

Gingrich said Kemp paid too much attention to the strong GOP vote in South Georgia and ran a campaign about small ideas, ignoring Atlanta, where most of the votes, and the sort of ambitious policies that might have appealed to them.

“Brian Kemp, who did a very effective job in the primary, ran a primary election in the general election,” Gingrich explained. “He spent almost no energy trying to reach suburban and exurban women and he came close to losing.”

  Atlantic Journal Constitution

We hope he DID lose. And why isn't Newt Gingrich back under his rock somewhere?

Remember that time, a year ago two Sundays ago, when Secretary of State Brian Kemp announced he had launched an investigation into the Democratic Party of Georgia and whether its employees and volunteers had engaged in attempting to hack the state’s voter registration database?

This morning, we contacted the Democratic party’s executive director, its chairman, and its representative on the state election board. None have heard a peep from law enforcement.

Counting unlawful votes. Destroying ballots. Sunshine Law violations. Busted deadlines.

So many controversies have bedeviled Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes — culminating in her office’s troubles in the aftermath of Florida’s chaotic 2018 elections — that her days in office are now numbered, insiders and lawmakers say.

She’s losing support from fellow Democrats and faces the increasing likelihood of an embarrassing suspension from office at the hands of either Gov. Rick Scott or his likely successor, Ron DeSantis.

  Politico

We hope Scott's successor is Andrew Gillum. And if he is, if this is all true about Snipes, he'd better be prepared to sideline her, too.

Removal proceedings in the GOP-led Florida Senate could also cause a possible rift among Florida state Senate Democrats if the black caucus rallies around Snipes in the same way it did around her predecessor, who was also African-American, more than a decade ago.

[...]

If Snipes is suspended by the governor, incoming Florida state Senate President Bill Galvano said it’s time to have his chamber investigate and prepare to strike the final blow by removing her from office — just as the chamber did to her predecessor, Miriam Oliphant, for mismanaging the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary.

“What she’s demonstrated over the years is a series of mistakes that rise above the level of negligence and into incompetence,” Galvano said. “We can’t continue to keep ignoring this and every option should be on the table.”

[...]

Democrats say Snipes has privately confided that she plans to quit, but it’s unclear when. “I hope it’s soon,” said one state Senate Democrat who declined to be named. “Otherwise, she’s a goner.” Heading into the election, Democratic campaigns fretted about what her mismanagement would do in the second-largest Democratic county in the state.

[...]

Scott’s lawsuit also references another lawsuit his campaign successfully brought against Snipes last week after she failed to provide public information concerning the votes she had left to tally after Election Day — information that should readily be at her fingertips and that, under Florida’s Sunshine Laws, she should have disclosed.

Snipes was unwilling or unable to provide the data, and her office didn’t follow state law requiring regular vote tally updates every 45 minutes, Scott’s new lawsuit alleges. Then, in the dead of night, the office suddenly uploaded tens of thousands of new ballots in the Democratic-heavy county, causing Scott’s margins statewide to fall so far that it triggered a recount, with his margin in the race against Sen. Bill Nelson falling below a half percent.

[...]

To cap it all off, the recount was supposed to start at 7 a.m. Sunday. But a number of technical glitches delayed the official start of the recount of the more than 700,000 ballots until just before noon. At the last minute, Snipes also admitted to mistakenly including 22 absentee ballots that, under state law, are considered “illegal” because the voter signature of the envelope they were contained in did not meet the voter signature on file.

[...]

The ultimate irony is that the Broward County ballot design approved by Snipes might have cost Nelson — not Scott — tens of thousands of votes. The race was tucked in the lower left-hand corner of the ballot, just under the instructions, and many voters appear to have missed it. Indeed, for the first time ever, the top-of-the-ticket Senate race received fewer votes than all of the other down-ballot statewide matches, including the contest for agriculture commissioner, which is also headed to a recount.

[...]

“Scott shouldn’t kick her out of office. He should send her flowers,” an insider connected to DeSantis said sarcastically.

[...]

However, the parade of horribles leads to one question that Scott’s spokesmen won’t or can’t answer: Why didn’t he suspend Snipes before if, as his suit says, she “has a long and troubling history of violating Florida election law, especially in close elections?"

That's a very good question.

What's wrong with Florida? They have a long history of election shenanigans and incompetence.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Hold the presses

Gillum conceded last night, but....



Also, Stacey Abrams in Georgia is asking for a recount.  And if Kemp hadn't ratfucked the voting system, she would be way out ahead.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Desperate measures

Because they can't win if they don't cheat.

Civil-rights organizations have sued on behalf of several minority-rights and voting-rights groups [in Georgia]. In response, a federal judge on Friday ordered the state to change its voting procedures to make it easier for voters flagged as potential noncitizens to prove their citizenship at the polls. And a different federal judge last month ordered Georgia election officials to take additional measures to notify and give people a chance to fix problems with their absentee-ballot applications or absentee ballots.

[...]

Georgia’s secretary of state and Republican gubernatorial nominee said Sunday his office is investigating the state’s Democratic Party over what it called a failed hacking attempt of the voter-registration system, a charge his Democratic opponent called a distraction in a high-profile election that has been dominated by issues of race and voting rights.

In a short statement on its website, the office of Republican Brian Kemp said little about its investigation and offered no evidence, saying only that the probe began Saturday night after a “failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.” The office said no personal data was breached. “Our system remains secure,” the statement said.

The Democratic Party of Georgia denied it attempted to improperly access voter information. “As Kemp aims to deflect blame for his failures, the questions everyone must be asking is: Why was the system vulnerable in the first place?” the party said in a statement.

[...]

Some cybersecurity researchers, in an interview and on social media, cast doubt on Mr. Kemp’s claims, noting that identifying the source of any alleged hack is an incredibly difficult aspect to any cyberinvestigation.

Mr. Kemp, 54 years old, was one of only a few secretaries of state who declined DHS offers to help improve the security of state voting systems in 2016, as reports were beginning to emerge of Russia-backed hacking of state election systems. And in December 2016, Mr. Kemp accused DHS itself of hacking into his office’s network, which the department’s inspector general later concluded wasn’t a cyberattack but residual traffic from a government employee doing a proper check of the state’s firearms database.

Mr. Kemp’s move, two days before final voting in an election already drawing Georgia voters to the polls in record numbers, comes as the 44-year-old [Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacy] Abrams and her supporters are accusing Mr. Kemp of using his power to oversee elections to suppress minority votes.

  WSJ

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Because they can't win if they don't cheat

What's wrong with this picture?  The guy overseeing the election is also running for office.

If Abrams wins, it will be against all odds, and I'm pulling for her. 

There's a reason his mouth is sphincter shaped

His opponent is a black woman.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Because they can't win if they don't cheat

Tens of thousands of would-be voters in Georgia have had their voter registrations put on hold, threatening their ability to cast a ballot in November, due to a policy implemented by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican candidate in next month’s election for governor. Of the 53,000 applications in limbo, 70 percent are from African Americans, according to an investigation by the Associated Press, even though Georgia is approximately 32 percent black.

Kemp’s office implemented an “exact match” policy, which requires information provided in a voter’s registration application to match up exactly with that person’s existing information in either the state’s Department of Driver Services database or the Social Security Administration’s records. A dropped hyphen in a last name or a middle initial instead of a middle name is enough to put an application on hold.

  Mother Jones

Guess who he's blaming if they don't get to vote? Yep, his rival, a black woman.

Kemp’s office blamed a voter registration group founded by Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent for governor, rather than his own office’s protocols, according to the AP:

Kemp accuses the organization of being sloppy in registering voters, and says they submitted inadequate forms for a batch of applicants that was predominantly black. His office has said the New Georgia Project used primarily paper forms and “did not adequately train canvassers to ensure legible, complete forms…”

These people can still cast provisional ballots. I don't know if they will be told that or not.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: