Florida is the asspit of voter suppression

Hmmmm....which county?



So they're missing a lot of Democratic votes, eh?

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

Keep counting

Overvotes and undervotes are not being recounted in the current machine recount in Florida.  I can see why they wouldn't be, since if the machine kicked this type out in the first place, there's no point in putting them back through the machine.  But this is ridiculous.  The undercounts and overcounts and anything that can't go through the machine, for whatever reason, should be included in the recount and done manually.  (They'll only be counted if the machine recount still shows the election within a narrow margin and a manual recount is forced.)  It's obvious who this person was voting for.  Florida's voting laws and counts suck.

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

Oh, Jesus

The Palm Beach County elections supervisor says aging equipment has overheated, causing mismatched results in the recount of ballots in Florida’s U.S. Senate race.

Susan Bucher said Tuesday night that the 11-year-old machines began having problems on Monday as early voting ballots were being counted. When the numbers were crunched on Tuesday, they didn’t match.

WPTV says a mechanic was flown in to fix the issues, but Bucher says “we don’t have a lot of assurances.”

She says the machines “started overheating so as a result the tally types are not reconciling properly.” That means about 174,000 early voting ballots in the state’s third most populous county will have to be recounted.

Workers are working around the clock to count the vote, but Bucher has already said they will not meet the state’s Thursday deadline to report the recounted votes. Nearly 600,000 ballots were cast in the county.

  AP

For crying out loud.  Florida must be the worst state in the union when it comes to vote counting. And has been for a very long time. Perhaps this is an issue that ought to be uppermost in its legislature's consideration before we get to 2020.

Also...

Florida’s ongoing recount battle will head back to a courtroom on Wednesday as lawyers for Democrats ask a federal judge to set aside the state law that mandates that a vote be thrown out if signatures on mail ballot envelopes don’t match the signature on file with election authorities.

Signatures on the fucking envelopes??!!

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

Meanwhile in Florida

Seven races need to be recounted???  Wow.

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

RecountingFlorida

If after the machine recount the results from any of these races has a margin of 0.25% or less, a hand recount will be ordered for undervotes and overvotes only - not the entire 8.1 million plus votes that have been cast.

The Florida Secretary of State's office defines undervotes as "no choice or fewer than the number of allowable choices in the recounted race(s) on their ballot." Essentially, a voter didn't pick someone for every race. The secretary defines overvotes as a voter who "designated more choices than allowable in recounted race(s) on their ballot" -- meaning a voter chose more than one candidate in a race.

Undervotes and overvotes are not included in the machine recount and are only checked if the race moves on to the manual recount.

There are still more ballots on the way possibly. Overseas military and civilian ballots are due by November 16. All overseas ballots postmarked and signed by Election Day are considered valid.

Once all returns are in, the county canvassing boards must certify the results and submit them to the secretary of state by noon on November 18.

Following the submission from the counties, the Election Canvassing Commission will meet to certify the results on Tuesday, at 9 a.m. on November 20. The commission includes the governor and two of his cabinet members.

[...]

Assuming the candidates don't back down and the margins stays close, any of these races could be challenged well into December.

  CNN

Seeing as how the governor is in a recount situation, it does seem like someone else should be doing the certifying.

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

Recount

Election officials from the US state of Wisconsin have certified Donald Trump's victory in the state, as a judge in Pennsylvania stopped a push for a recount there, putting an end to the Green Party candidate's push for a closer look at the November 8 presidential election results.

The results in Wisconsin changed only slightly after election officials conducted a 10-day recount before reconfirming Trump as the official winner on Monday.

The head of the north-central state's elections commission announced the results, saying Trump won by 22,748 votes, which is 131 votes more than the original margin between him and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

[...]

But according to American constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz, who appeared on the programme Democracy Now!: "While some counties have agreed to hand-count the ballots, other counties are not."

According to Bonifaz, these counties are "feeding the ballots through the very same machines that gave us the tallies on election night.

[...]

On Monday a federal judge rejected Stein's initiative to secure a recount in Pennsylvania. Trump's lawyers had filed a suit there seeking to deny Stein's request. Recount efforts were also thwarted in Michigan after another federal judge halted that drive, citing a lack of evidence that fraud or errors had occurred.

  alJazeera

Apparently in this country, we are not fond of recounts.

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

Still Counting

Was it merely old equipment which incompetent officials had failed to bother getting serviced, or was there something intentionally sinister going on? That’s the question now coming out of Michigan, where just as the statewide recount is getting underway, officials are finally admitting that the majority of vote counting machines in Detroit broke on election day. The stunning admission, which is getting virtually no national news coverage despite appearing in a major Detroit newspaper, casts doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s supposed narrow win in the state.

Even now, elections director Daniel Baxter appears to only be making the admission as part of a convoluted argument for why the ballots in those Detroit precincts can’t be recounted. He’s acknowledging that eighty-seven optical scanners in Detroit simply “broke” on the same day.

  Palmer Report

That doesn't seem suspicious at all.

[H]e and other Michigan officials are now making the argument that, because the broken machines resulted in different vote totals on the machines than on the precinct log books, state law means those ballots can’t be recounted.

[...]

[T]he mere fact that fifty-nine percent of the vote counting machines in Michigan’s biggest city all broke on the same day is standing out as a stunning development. It calls into question why officials failed to publicly disclose this information until they needed it for their convoluted argument against recounting the majority of Detroit’s [82% African-American] votes.

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

Michigan Halts Recount

Michigan Republicans celebrated a victory Wednesday after US District Judge Mark Goldsmith ruled that a statewide recount was unwarranted, effectively cementing a victory in the state for President-elect Donald Trump. Republicans argued that Stein had no authority to seek a recount due to her earning only 1 percent of the vote.

[...]

While Goldsmith ruled against Stein, he did consider that, "the vulnerability of our system of voting poses the threat of a potentially devastating attack on the integrity of our election system," although he stressed that it did not justify a recount.

[...]

Opponents [of the recount] were quick to explain that Michigan’s recount law does not exist in order to prove the legitimacy of the election but rather to contend the results.

[...]

Stein’s attorneys argued that her involvement in the election entitled her to call for a recount. In addition, they also pointed to problems uncovered with their recount, such as in Detroit, where over 50 percent of the district’s votes were not counted for undisclosed reasons.

[...]

Stein's attorneys have already appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court to have the earlier Court of Appeals decision overturned. Stein is also still able to pursue an appeal in the state Supreme Court over the district court judge’s ruling.

  RT

To be continued.

Buckle Your Seatbelts

More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump, as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all its 3m ballots.

[...]

Stein argued that Wisconsin’s plan to allow automatic recounting “risks tainting the recount process” because the electronic scanning equipment involved may incorrectly tally the results and could have been attacked by foreign hackers.

  Guardian

And the Mad Tweeter will be up all night, every night.

He only has himself to blame. He's the one who kept squealing about a rigged election.

Stein, the Green party’s presidential election candidate, is working to secure full recounts in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump surprised pollsters by narrowly beating Clinton on his way to a national victory in the electoral college.

Personally, I don't think there had to be any rigging for Hillary to lose even those states. The Democrats just can't accept it. I'm a bit surprised, however, that Jill Stein is carrying that water.

A petition from Stein requesting a recount was accepted by Wisconsin last Friday. Her efforts to obtain a recount in Pennsylvania met serious difficulties on Monday as it became clear she needed three voters in each of the state’s 9,163 voting precincts to request a recount on her behalf, and that deadlines to do so had passed in many precincts.

Wisconsin also told Stein on Monday that the recount, which was previously estimated to cost $1m, would actually cost $3.5m and that the funds must be produced by the end of Tuesday. Stein has raised more than $6m for the three-state recount effort using online crowdfunding.

Wow.

Aaaaand...he's off.

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