MIKE CLAIMS VOTE 'FRAUD' (Mayor Bloomberg regarding zero votes for Barack Obama)

[sabra]

Source: NYPost

February 20, 2008 -- Mayor Bloomberg charged yesterday that "fraud" was behind the unofficial results in the New York Democratic presidential primary that produced zero votes for Barack Obama in some districts.

"If you want to call it significant undercounting, I guess that's a euphemism for fraud," said the mayor.

Unofficial tallies on election night gave Obama no votes in 78 out of more than 6,000 election districts.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/seven/02202008/news/regionalnews/mike_claims_vote_fraud_98436.htm

[babylonsister]

1. Good for Bloomberg; I think he's right. Now, how to make it right? nt

[Fredda Weinberg]

2. Think twice before accepting anything from the NY Post at face value

Their bread and butter is yellow journalism.

[EFerrari]

3. True but this is a direct quote and can be checked. There

really is no room for spin.

[Fredda Weinberg]

6. Actually, if you look at Mike's quote, the Post did the usual n/t

[Infinite Hope]

13. Yeah they made up the story...ugh! What's with Clinton supporters and denying reality?

It smells of the Bush years. Numerous times lately they've denied stories and quotes from this one to John Lewis' superdelegate story.

[Fredda Weinberg]

15. I'm a NYer. Mike comes from Boston. The NYPost is a rag

These are facts. There's another: all our elections w/lever systems are worth shit - and you should have been calling out DUers, as I have, who've ignored my city's history of placing unworkable equipment in poor and minority districts.

You think you're going to hear the truth from Mike, who's thinking of running himself?

This isn't partisan. Both Democrats and Republicans use it to their advantage. But your attitude is part of the problem.

[Infinite Hope]

16. So you think the paper made up the quote/interview with Bloomberg? n/t

[Fredda Weinberg]

18. I just finished listening to Mike. The process has never worked ...

this cycle was no different. Whoever voted on one of those infernal lever machines and it wasn't registered is screwed ... but this is nothing new.

Next time a DUer says our system is just fine - call 'em out!!!

[Infinite Hope]

21. My premise was the newspaper's quote of Bloomberg was accurate.

That was the topic of my comment.

[Fredda Weinberg]

22. No, MIke never claimed Fraud. That's the NY Post. When asked, he

demurred.

[L0oniX]

4. So can those votes be recovered and possible delegates for Obama?

[Igel]

10. The votes weren't lost.

Since you must know by now how early results are reported and official results are obtained in precincts with lever machines, the answer to how the mistake was made and how it was discovered and rectified is in-your-face obvious.

But then again, a person of your perspicacity surely already knows that.

For others, though, here's a recap.

On election night, the poll workers crack open the back of the lever machine; the poll workers are to be evenly split in number between the two parties that got the most votes in the previous general election. In the back of the machine they see a bunch of what look like odometers. They have a form to fill out, and need to call off numbers from the back of the machine. It's not immediately obvious which 'odometer' goes with which race, there are almost always unused columns and rows interlaced with those that were used, and it's not all that hard to get columns and rows bollixed up so that you call off the wrong numbers, esp. since you only do it once every year or so (and newbies frequently get it wrong). For this reason usually members from the two opposing parties monitor the recording and two do the calling. They close the machine and seal it; then they sign the form and some poll worker carries it over to the BOE. The form = early voting results, and is the first line of defense against tampering.

A week or two later the *official* canvassing of the machines occurs. The BOE--never one person alone, and always with a technician--open each machine and record the numbers. This they do every year, and at least one of the people is typically familiar with the machines so they usually don't make mistakes. They then close the machines up pending acceptance of the final results. If there's a discrepancy between the election-night totals and the official canvassing, they're supposed to resolve the discrepancy and re-examine the machine and talk to at least the precinct captain to reconstruct what led to the discrepancy. Until the machine election totals are zeroed out by a tech, no votes that were recorded are lost.

In this case, as with so many other sensational stories, the routine process that's in place catches the errors that provide the story, but then in the interest of selling the story the process is at least partly obscured, so it's assumed that some divine revelation or whistleblower spoke truth to the powers that be and exposed some horrible secret. The horrible secret is that in this case, it really does seem that the usual, official, plodding, boring process worked, and that the poll workers screwed up (again). But victimhood is so much flashier and conspiracy so much more glamorous and outrage-inducing than simply saying that the faceless clerks and office workers, probably union members, actually just did their job.

Kudos to the faceless union members.

[The Croquist]

19. Thanks for the information; now for my opinion...

As I stated on an earlier thread on this, this is almost certainly NOT fraud. This is poll worker incompetence. Everything you said above supports my opinion.

What kind of an idiot is going to deliberately undercount votes when it can be so easily checked and corrected?

To cheat in hundreds of precincts (78 out of 6000 isn't going to make a difference) you need hundreds of conspirators. If even one talks your chances of winning is destroyed and you might end up in jail. I've managed to avoid jail but I've heard it can not only leave a bad taste in your mouth but be a pain in the ass.

Hillary Clinton was expected to win NY easily. Cheating in NY makes about as much sense as Nixon cheating against McGovern in 1972 and we all know how that worked out.

Mayor Bloomberg's statement is short, to the point and extremely reckless. "If you want to call it significant undercounting, I guess that's a euphemism for fraud,"

He made a claim with NO evidence. Personally I think he is trying to stir up trouble between our two candidates to his own advantage.

The real problem are the poll workers. How tough is it to accurately record numbers? Are the different columns in the machine not identified and if so is the recording sheet not marked with identical markings?

Why not send two separate teams to record the votes, have them do it separately, then compare them? My precinct in Georgia usually has a dozen workers in it when I vote. There are only about 20 machines. Would it be too tough to have 4 of them record votes instead of 2? How much longer would it really take?

Lets take this a step further. Lets say that these mistakes swung the initial reporting of an election say in Florida in 2000. The initial count went Gore and the recount 1 or 2 weeks later said Bush. We would be screaming fraud but it's just incompetence.

This is an indictment over NON electronic vote tabulation. I don't like a lack of paper trails either but here we have an example of a non-electronic system that is unacceptable.

Recording numbers accurately isn't tough to do.

[unc70]

20. Thank you for a dose of sanity around here.

It probably won't be enough to make a difference around here these days, but glad for your effort. I'm not from NY, but am aware of the old lever machines and the manual transcription of the values from the counters.

[Alcibiades]

5. It is possible

Its not necessarily fraud, given that there are 6,000 districts. You'd expect a few outliers where no Obama supporters made it to the polls. Still, 78 seems like a lot. I'd be interested to know the demographic makeup of those precincts. From what we saw in Florida, you would think that at least a few would vote for Obama by accident, at least!

It would be more interesting if anyone can confirm actual voters in these 78 zero-Obama vote precincts who did vote for him.

[EFerrari]

8. Some of those precincts were in Harlem.

Amy Goodman reported it on Monday or Tuesday this week.

[Igel]

11. The original NYT article gave the presumably

correct totals that replaced the unofficial election-night reports.

It was the replacement of unofficial results by official results that prompted the story in the first place. Since the unofficial results have standing only for early publicity purposes (that easily quantifiable momentum of an inherently massless abstract noun) there's no legal recourse--no harm no foul. Of course, people have claimed that the unofficial results led to the press attributing delegates to HRC that she never earned (and never actually received), reducing BO's "momentum" in some non-quantifiable but obviously hugh!! way.

[Just-plain-Kathy]

7. I always wondered why Hillary did nothing about election fraud.

Maybe we could stop another stolen election.

[Mark D.]

9. Bilderberg

She, her husband, Bush and his father (one of her husband's best friends) are memebers. Obama is not. They are playing a chess game disguised as honest rivalry. Whoever wins, they win and the chairs on the Titanic are just arranged differently. Why contest Bush when she knew the disaster four more years would net, and help her side of the chess team maybe win this time. Obama was a wrench in that process not expected, not prepared for, and luckily, at least not yet, a Bilderberg puppet.

Bloomberg does right to push for clarity. But let's hope this friendliness doesn't translate to a push for him to be VP for Obama. I don't care if he calls himself 'independent', it's a new name for more of the same Republicans. That'd be a stealth way to have the GOP on either ticket. Not good. The whole 'independent' group he put together of Republican lite should worry us all.

[aquart]

See above. There was no fraud. All the votes are there.

But how easily you assume there was.

[Just-plain-Kathy]

17. I don't trust the Clintons. Period.

Bill Clinton didn’t hold Bush Sr. accountable for his bogus war, and Bill already told us to "forget about the past and look forward". ...We know Hillary will never hold Bush accountable. ...One could only vote for the only other democrat and hope for the best.

We have to remember, Bill Clinton’s NAFTA helped Hillary’s ex-employer Wal-Mart. His Iraqi Liberation Act laid the foundation for the Iraq war and called for the oust of Saddam. Clinton’s Telecommunications Act consolidated our media. We use to have over eighty moguls owning our media, now we have six. Six corporations which have holdings in companies profiting directly from these wars.

The Clintons were the "past administration" that advised our senate on their IWR vote.


Hillary voted for the war, show her the door!


:patriot:

[AlertLurker]

12. "If you want to call me mayor, I guess that's a euphemism for moron."

Clinton had the first column in the machines, Obama had the FIFTH. Figure it OUT, numbnuts!

P.S. Does anyone still READ the NY Post?

[TwilightGardener]

14. I appreciate his honesty, especially since Obama's loss would make it easier for him to run.

[aldo]

23. Lets start by investigating Mayor Mikes election

He may have opened a can of worms here. For me that election never passed the smell test. Green threw in the towel before all the votes were counted at the suggestion of DLC advisors (its amazing how Democratic campaigns with central DLC advisors almost always lose). As for Green, show me a good loser and Ill show you a loser. Its sad, we needed an honest mayor for the 911 investigations.