Recommendations

[BevHarris]

Two more things:

1. Encourage candidates -- all candidates -- NOT TO CONCEDE ON ELECTION NIGHT. There is no good reason to concede, and here are three reasons not to:
- Large amount of provisional ballots. These are NOT used in projecting the winner. They are poorly accounted for (and the auditing procedures for these are especially poor in Colorado).

- At least three documented cases of voting machines flipping the vote completely. Let's say you are Candidate A and you are at 20% of the vote. Candidate B has 80%. Should you concede? Not really. Three documented cases of the votes being exactly reversed -- all yes was no, or all repub was actually dem.

- Al Gore, in 2000, conceded prematurely, privately, to George. W. Bush, based on what turned out to be minus 16,022 votes on a rigged voting machine, specifically, the GEMS central tabulator (this is Diebold). He ws 2 blocks from conceding to the nation when the -16,022 was discovered.

2. Don't look here, look there...

We've got tens of thousands out in the field with Election Protection and legal teams -- watching the voting.

What they aren't watching very much is the counting.

The counting of the vote happens after the polls close. You won't see anything at all until then, and in most cases, voting machine miscounts are not picked up until the canvass -- the audit.

Therefore, expect to see most voting machine problems reported around Nov. 12, not Nov. 2.

More voting machine snafus will be revealed with discovery and public records requests, and will not appear until weeks later.

This time, we can say, "we'd like it speedy" or we can say "we'd like it accurate."

Which would you prefer?

And yes, we need volunteers for the Cleanup Crew.

Specific tasks Tues/Wed involve setting up an infrastructure for citizen auditing of the voting machine counts. This is done by posting to forums, using almost exactly the same posting mechanism as you do here at DU.

To volunteer, sign up at blackboxvoting.org and also, for the immediate task, email me or Andy

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