both LasVegasDave and Flutters.
Posted on 12/23/2011 1:32:26 PM PST by EBH
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Scanners Cuyahoga County has used to tally election results since 2008 are defective, missing some votes, freezing up inexplicably and failing to log problems, according to a federal government agency.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission released its findings this week, after a 20-month investigation spurred by an April 2010 Plain Dealer story. The paper reported a tenth of the machines arbitrarily powered down and locked up, failing certification tests required by federal law.
The manufacturer, Omaha-Neb.-based Elections Systems & Software Inc., tried to fix the problems this year, but the upgrade actually created more problems, according to the report. If the company can't correct the flaw, the government could decertify the machines -- leaving Cuyahoga and jurisdictions without the country no way to conduct elections in a presidential year.
Taxpayers spent more than $12 million on the scanners in 2008, to replace a $21 million touch-screen system that crashed twice on the night of the 2007 general election. The scanners were used in the 2008 presidential election, the 2009 election that ushered in a charter government, the 2010 election that chose new county leaders and countless local elections affecting taxes, city councils and school boards.
Cuyahoga County elections chief Jane Platten said late Thursday that the scanner-counted results for all elections are accurate. Her staff has created safeguards to work around the problems, including hand-counting certain races to make sure ballots are accurately counted.
"The system works," Platten said. "There are definitely problems that need to absolutely be fixed. . . We verify so we are confident in that in every single election."
The Election Assistance Commission was created by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, passed in the aftermath of the controversial 2000 presidential election that put George W. Bush into the White House.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.cleveland.com ...
Republican election observors were not allowed to photograph etc. inside the polling locations in Cuyahoga county. We were not allowed to use our cellphones etc. either. We had to step off the polling site to make any calls regarding irregularities.
GOP representatives got caught very short-sighted in 2008.
Poll Watcher Fiasco, Ohio To FR PM Message| 11/16/2008 3:19:17 PM PST sent
I really, really want to post this to the boards! What happened in Ohio was a crime and this is how BAD WE WERE! We couldn’t have saved our butts if they had been on fire. OHH!
To: Volunteers for Poll Watching Cuyahoga County.
I’m writing to both explain and apologize for the problems and failures which occurred during the election.
I first arrived in Cleveland on October 20th, as a New York volunteer for the Republican Party. Including election day I spent 10 days working to recruit Poll Observers and during that time spoke to many of you, asking for help defending the polls from illegal voting. Many of you agreed and following that agreement never received either an assignment, credentials that had been promised, or both. Many of you waited anxiously on November 3rd for credentials and assignments.
The details of multiple communications failures are a long tail of miss-steps that included spam filters, lack of training, multiple qualifying procedures, overtaxed volunteers and lack of co-ordination with workers in Columbus headquarters. Only after the fact did I realize that there were only a few polling stations that we could place observers in that were not in the heart of Cleveland, the most challenging areas of town. Columbus was making an effort to further qualify people for these difficult assignments after I had already spoken to many of you. They then excluded many because they couldn’t contact you in time. If they didn’t recontact you then you were never assigned. Even if some of you were contacted concerning a location the time was so short and the staff in Columbus so taxed for the time available that some were left hanging with a location, no credentials, but plenty of anxiety.
This is the short answer to what went on and why I am writing to apologize for the failures prior to the election. Hopefully things will run more smoothly in the future.
Thanks to all of you who stepped forward to protect the integrity of the voting system. My best wishes go out to you all.
Sincerely,
GOP Representative
OK GOP! The investigation is done and yeah you did here from those of us that had volunteered to be boots on the ground in 2008. Now...we've got 10 months to fix this, be on top of this, and we have a Republican Gov. that we should be on the back of in 2012 for good, clean elections.
Cuyahoga is big enough to swing the state and corrupt enough that they have routinely gotten away with it.
Ping!
How can we keep this from happening in 2012? Being involved or trying to get involved was a huge fiasco as well.
Where do we start now? Tea Party groups in the county?
The entire electoral process was compromised and undermined years ago, after the U.S. Government decided to intentionally stand and watch as tens of millions of illegal aliens poured into our country.
It's not only undermined our electoral process, but our health care industry, our schools, jails, stolen jobs, taken over entire industries, and choked off our hospitals and social services.
It's no different than the U.S. Government flooding the U.S. with trillions in counterfeit currency. Oh, wait, that happened too.
We need paper ballots read by Federal Marshalls. To steal another person’s vote by casting a fraudulent vote is to deny him his Constitutional rights. This cannot happen here and still remain America.
Cuyahoga encompases Cleveland. Correct?
A government that refuses to protect and secure it’s legitimate sovereign borders, will itself eventually become illegitimate.
It’s very upsetting to realize that our elections can so easily be corrupted. I know many groups in states around the country have been trying to make the election process more fraud resistant. What more can we do to help? Each of us here has to stop talking about the fraud and do something. Sitting around talking about it will solve nothing. We only have months to prevent a disaster in November from happening. How can we organize a mass effort to help?
At this time in Cuyahoga the best we can do is minimize the election corruption. Contrary to what the maps tell you about the county, there are lots of conservative type folks in the county.
I will never forget the election in 2008. Between the the democrats in Columbus to the county...the deception, the legalese stuff, the difficulty placed in our way of making sure we had a clean election was incredible. I would have to really dig up the history, but the GOP attorneys had an impossible time of dealing with State of Ohio.
Check the map and you will see Cuyahoga is the most populous in the state. Most of Ohio went red in 2008.
Right now the FBI is in the midst of imprisoning literally dozens of former county and city employees from County Commissioner on down. In 2010 a judge was running for re-election while under criminal indictment for fraud and corruption. She lost, but not by much--got a quarter million votes.
According to the 2010 Census, Cleveland’s population stands at 431,363.
County is at 1280122.
Rampant fraud. All of this stuff is not going to be easy to clean up once we get control again.
Thanks EBH.
Time to start stocking up on supplies — mostly guns and ammo.
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