Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Fayetteville, Voting Problems

This is soooo funny. On the day that Charlie Daniels is debating Jim Lagrone about the oh so minor election glitches, the Northwest Arkansas Times runs two articles about election problems in Fayetteville.

Thefirst reports

There were 2, 457 ballots cast in both annexation elections, but poll workers reported 2, 333 voters participated.

Burrow said that while they will recount the ballots, they may never fully reconcile the differences in totals. The results of the vote will remain preliminary until certified, which will likely be a week from Friday, he said.

Doesn't that scare you! They may never figure out why there's a difference in the counts. Excuse meee! But we have a big problem here! There were only a couple of thousand votes cast! What is going to happen Nov 7th when tens of thousands votes are cast? One big bloody mess!

The discrepancies were found after election workers encountered problems with voting machines, which required having to purchase a flash memory card because the one provided by the company that supplies the machines would not work.

Those damn machines again! Those freaking machines aren't working! Why are we still using them?
The next article repeats

According to John Logan Burrow, election commission chairman, the final results as of Tuesday's count were 1, 274 votes for Delap and 706 votes for Jeanie Hill, the other candidate in the runoff.
However, according to the records, there were 2, 270 ballots cast, a difference of about 290.
There were also some problems with the Fayetteville annexation election, where the number of ballots cast exceeded the number of recorded voters.

You know, you may not agree with Jim Lagrone, you may not like that he's a Republican, you may not like that he's a preacher. However, he's knows and acknowleges that there are big problems with counting votes in Arkansas. Jim Lagrone is determined to correct that. Charlie Daniels is in the corner crying like a baby, that it's everyone else's fault.

UPDATE:
A report today said the problem has been resolved.
According to [John]Burrow, in one election there were more voters than ballots and, in another, more ballots than voters.
“ When transferring the early and absentee votes into the grand total, we slipped up and either doubled or omitted those numbers, ” he said. “ It’s a misstep we’ve had problems with in the past; we’ve tried to be vigilant, but sometimes it crops up again. ”

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