did power really go out and then come back on and Schmidt won?!?!?!?!?!

[bobbieinok]

I refused to follow the vote.......I refused to follow the vote in 98 and democrats won everywhere (even the governor's race in IA)......my son called late that night and said 'mom, are you watching??? it's incredible'.....

I followed the vote in 2000, 2002, and 2004 and......so I thought maybe I'd try not jinxing the results

but really: was there a power outage and then Scmidt pulled significantly ahead???? if so, how can anyone take the results seriously?????

maybe we should substitute power 'outrage' for power outage?????

[napi21]

1. I know that's what was reported, but Dean was on Randi's show

today, and he said the DNC is looking into that. It was a very convenient thing to have happen, wasn't it?

Randi spent most of today talking about it.

I think we have to see what happens.

[FreedomAngel82]

9. Did that really happen?

If so wouldn't that be illegit? How could they declair her a winner if so many votes were lost or weren't counted? Don't they have a paper trail at least? This is the first I've heard of this. Very convient indeed. I'm glad Dean is on the ground looking at it. I hope he has some very good lawyers. He should talk to Arnebeck. I wish Dean would work with him.

[seabeyond]

11. they started hand counting. why it took so long from that point on

[WCGreen]

42. She isn't offically declared he winner for another 30 days...

The various boards have to certify the results

[AmandaRuth]

2. I'm with you

sometimes I wonder how much more we are going to take before we hit the streets in a serious manner.

[Algorem]

3. didja hear about the Air America station there going off the air for 1/2

hour before polls closed?

[AntiCoup2K4]

5. Actually, I believe Randi said it was 50 minutes.

And it was a FEAR CHANNEL station.

Do I need to draw a picture here?

[Algorem]

12. They told the guy filling in for Ed Schultz that they had a fire.Riiiight.

[Imagevision]

28. See! if there were paper trails we wouldn't have these problems!

who hand counted the 91 precincts the repugs and they then said what? we won? now Ikinow why they call dems sheeple!

[rexcat]

4. I am sure that a power outage...

would not disrupt the punch ballots since most of the counties in the OH 2nd district use them. If we had electronic voting I would be very concerned. Please, how in the hell can a power outage disrupt the frigging count. Please take off your tinfoil hats before you get brain damage.

I though we Dems did good in the district. Unfortunately the three largest counties don't have any Democrats holding public office in any capacity (from dog catcher, municipal, township or county positions). That is how repukian this area is. It was not a landslide (52% to 48%) and I give Paul Hackett a lot of credit along with the Democrats in the district. He gave a hell of a fight. Schmidt is just like Portman. They are both repuke whores.

Sorry for the rant above but I am tired of the conspiracy theories. This area is crawling with repukes. Paul lost and it hurts more than you can imagine, especially if you live in a blue state. I have lived in Warren County for 17 years and this is the closest we Democrats have come to upsetting the apple cart. This has energized us and we need to work harder for the 2006 elections.

[wli]

6. optiscan machines, stickers over bubbles, etc.

It's not tinfoil. These are criminals we're dealing with, and another criminal act from them is nothing out of the ordinary.

It furthermore fits the pattern of a number of prior criminal acts (granted, they evaded prosecution).

[David Gill 2006]

7. Rex...

You're right, Paul put up a great fight, and it really hurts from here in Illinois. I think candidates around the nation can learn valuable lessons from his campaign. Imagine if we could pull those kinds of numbers in rural counties on a regular basis. The presidential elections wouldn't even be close. Our campaign for IL-15 will be looking to push hard in a similarly red district.

[Nikki Stone 1]

8. My deepest sympathies

The fact that a Dem got 48% in a repug area is actually an indication that the party was out there fighting and that lots of people are getting fed up.

[FreedomAngel82]

10. Then why is Dean going to waste his time?

I guess you believe John Kerry lost 2004 too right?

[rexcat]

13. Really,

If you would have taken the time to read my post and multiple others that I have posted on other threads here on DU concerning this issue I don't think you would have responded in such a sophomoric way. Please read my multiple posts concerning this topic. You will get a better sense of what was going on in Warren County. I am also not saying that everything was on the up and up but overt fraud just does not make the case, IMO.

I was a polling judge in Warren County as a Democrat. There is no way, given the information that I have been given, BY DEMOCRATS at the BofE office, and my experience at the polling station that anything was mishandled by the BofE in Warren County Ohio. I also worked the Kerry/Edwards phone lines and did neighborhood canvasing for MoveOn.org. It is not like I am or was not involved in the election.

On edit: I will make it easy for you, here are some of the threads with my responses.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1983503&mesg_id=1983563

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1980725&mesg_id=1983512

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1980679&mesg_id=1980798

You can also do a search on this web site using my username.

[MissWaverly]

15. I apologize that people are skeptical

but here in Baltimore in 04, I waited 2 hours to vote, saw the machine
default to GWB 5 times when I pressed square next to Kerry and the BOE
for Baltimore only shows 944 votes for the entire day at my polling place, when I estimated there were 400-500 people there just while I was there.

[rexcat]

27. Here in Warren County OH people stood...

in line from one to two hours early in the day (from when the polls opened to about 11:00AM then the lines thinned out. Don't get me wrong I think there were things going on but it was with the provisional ballots, not that they would have made any difference in the vote here in SW Ohio. What we need are candidates that can articulate there portions as succinctly as they can. That is where the repukians have it over us Democrats.

[mikelewis]

30. They articulate thier message better? Who was Shmidt?

What did he/she stand for? What platform did he/she run on? Was this race about Schimdt or about Hackett? Hackett ran a national campaign that gleaned him a lot of exposure and support from all corners of America. The fact that he was a vet who opposed Bush's policies rocketed him to the national stage and had people like John Glenn and Howard Dean stumping for him. Who stumped for Schimdt? Bush? Cheney? Does anyone know who this person is? The point is, the Republicans didn't run on a clear message, they ran a smear campaign, impugning a fucking Soldier who still had sand in his underwear from Iraq. That's not running an issues based campaign. That's playing down and dirty. The Republicans have nothing over us Democrats.

They're vile slime and until you get it through your dense head that elections can be stolen and in fact are being stolen, you're going to sit around thinking they're actually beating us in the arena of ideas instead of sneaking points for thier guy. They are stealing elections right under your nose and just because you haven't caught them doesn't mean they aren't doing it. The point is to do it in such a way that they can get away with it without your noticing. Well some of us noticed and it's like squeezing blood from a turnip to get people to wake up and see it.

Go back to the 2004 election archives and read a few post about long lines, provisional ballots, absentee ballots, intimidation, registration fraud, deception. If those things are acceptable to you then your vision of America is completely different than mine. If you believe they may be willing to keep a few thousand people standing in line out in the cold rain just to try to disparage voters, do you honestly believe they won't rig a machine? Hell, that's more humane, I wouldn't leave my dog out in the rain and I don't like the ugly fucker. You gotta wake up man, sheesh.

[rexcat]

38. I was not specifically saying Schmidt...

was more articulate but there are a lot of right wingnuts that live in the 2nd Congressional district of Ohio. Schmidt appealed to the base of the repukian party. If you are not from this area you probably don't understand the mindset of these idiots.

As far as your comments concerning the 2004 election, I was in the middle of this mess. I canvased neighborhoods for MoveOn.org and took a lot of heat from the repukians. I was on the Kerry/Edwards phone lines in Mason, OH and I was a polling judge, as a Democrat in a very red precinct, and saw what happened. Yes, the lines were long and most of the people in Warren County were Repukes (88% of the registered voters in this fucking county are repukes). Yes there were issues with the provisional ballots like I have said before in many posts but the provisional ballots, if counted would have made no difference to the outcome of the vote. I saw no voter intimidation and every polling station had observers and they DID NOT REPORT ANY VOTER INTIMIDATION so I think you need a reality check.

Given Ohio law there must be a minimum of two repukes and two Democrats at each polling station. I know several Democrats who work at the BofE in Warren County and they would not have allowed the other side to do any malfeasance. In Warren County we still use the punch ballot and the number of spoiled ballots was in the 1% range as would be expected with an election.

There were many posts from DU members who are not from this state and I still see a lot of unsubstatiated accusations concerning the election. Voting fraud is a major issue and we are trying to prevent it from happening, even in Warren County. May I suggest that you take off your tinfoil hat before it causes any more brain damage to you!

[MissWaverly]

34. I also have no confidence in electronic voting

I still think there is no way to prove that the electronic votes are not being manipulated, my boss has PC anywhere and can access her computer from home w/o physically being there, who's to say that remote access software can do the same with voting machines.

[mikelewis]

37. Dear, with Remote Access, I can get you arrested on Child Porn charges...

If you're computer is open to the net, I can get into your hard-drive, upload about a gig worth of nasty kiddie porn and then burn the OS so the upload couldn't be easily traced. They'd assumed you downloaded it off a disk. I'd make sure I sent out about a dozen porn pics to a few religious sites before I crashed your system. I can do all this without even leaving my chair. You're life can be destroyed as easily as I type this post. Changing a lousy vote is as easy as pie. The people who say there's no way are just ignorant. They have no idea what they're talking about. They almost treat thier ignorance like a religion, they put so much trust in thier eyes, they never realize they need glasses.

[MissWaverly]

41. I know that this is possible

that is what I am saying that the majority of the seniors who work the
polls are not computer literate, they do not understand how the internets work and they would never dream of the capabilities of the internet, they think of computers as filing cabinets where data is stored, little realizing that to some, the data being stored is totally fluid.

[rexcat]

39. You have an excellent point...

what I think should be done is to have a paper trail and do a manual recount along with the electronic count to verify that the electronic count is valid which really makes the system useless. What we need is a non-partisan company write the software and keep corrupt companies like Diebold out of the voter machine business.

[MissWaverly]

40. the achilles heel for election reform

I think that honest people are on the ground in these elections,
working the polls, but it is what is going on unseen inside the
machines that is the problem, I work in a hospital and we have quality
control checks on the machines to make sure that the results are accurate and we have required training for those who run the machines and competency verifications periodically. What we keep hearing is that
poll workers were not trained, that the machines malfunctions constantly
and when they do, nothing is done, that the power failed or that the
memory cards were bad. It seem like a high error/failure rate for something that is done for one day, and these electronic systems have
cost the U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars, why is there no accountablity for equipment failures.

[Eloriel]

17. Well, since you know so much, just how do you think they COUNT those

"punch ballots"? Hmmmmm? A little piece of software running a mechanical counter, that's how.

Please take off your tinfoil hats before you get brain damage.

Yeah, thanks for the warning. I can see your NOT wearing one has really done a job.

YOU don't know if Schmidt won or lost. YOU don't know if the counts were right or not. YOU don't know if there was fraud or not -- though if "This area is crawling with repukes," then given their track record and esp. in Ohio, there WAS fraud.

[ray of light]

36. thank you and can you get dems elected in other capacities too?

Join the Democracy Cell Project too to help organize your grassroots now! We're trying to help people get their 50 state plan without waiting for the "big guys" to come to town to get them started.

http://www.democracycellproject.net

[truth2power]

14. There WAS a power outage election night

from about 11:15 pm to 11:30 as reported to me by a friend who lives about 5-6 miles from the board of elections in Batavia, OH.

Whether or not the power was out in Batavia, OH where the BoE is located, I can't say. There should be someone who can answer this question.

[FogerRox]

16. Isnt Warren the regional headquarters of the KKK ?

[truth2power]

23. Years ago there was a lot of KKK activity in Warren County,

don't know anything about the present, though.

I was referring to Clermont County. A power outage would affect the vote count there, because Clermont uses optical scan ballots. A pencil is used to blacken a circle next to a candidate's name.

Ballots are put in a locked box at the polling place and the boxes are transported to the board of elections after the polls close. No count takes place at the polling place.

The ballots are then put through machines that tabulate the votes. I would imagine it's possible to mess with the programming of the machines, but I don't know how that works.

The good thing about this kind of system is that you still have the paper ballots in the event a recount (by hand) is called for.

I don't know why this kind of system can't be used across the country.

[theHandpuppet]

32. No, its in Clermont County

The Imperial Klans of America, a Ku Klux Klan group, is based in Amelia in Clermont County. They are an active group in the Cincinnati area.

[ClayZ]

18. They kept saying it was the HUMIDITY

making the voting machines not count.

[babsbunny]

22. Delete

[snowbear]

19. Wasn't the vote at 50/50 when the "humidity" knocked the power out?

How often does humidity knock the power out anyway? :argh:

When it came back on, old lady Schmidt was up by a butt-load..

[babylonsister]

20. Yes, larissa, the vote was

at 50/50 for over an hour. I kept checking and then went to bed, ever hopeful.x(

[phillysuse]

21. It was the GEMS tabulator

Remember that the GEMS tabulator counts the votes.
GEMS stands for Global Election Management System.

You vote on a touch screen or optical scan machine
at your precinct.

At the end of the night, the precinct count goes
to a central server in the county Board of Elections building.

That server contains software for counting the votes.
The GEMS program tallies the votes of all the precincts and then generates the report of the final election results.

GEMS has the interesting property of having two tables of
data that don't always match. One tables contains rows recording
the votes of each candidate from the voting machine memory
cards at each precinct. The other table consists of summary
data. The raw precinct data check is used to check
accuracy but the second table is the official vote since
it is summary data.

GEMS is proprietary software owned by Republicans.

It counted 85% of the votes in 2004 in Ohio.

Guess what whoever counts the votes wins the election.

It's the tabulator, stupid.

[oxbow]

24. If there were dirty tricks involved, it's time for serious action

If Dean finds evidence that there was cheating involved and nothing is done about it, its time to hit the streets

[phillysuse]

25. Dean has been silent on GEMS

Dean has been surprisingly silent on the GEMS tabulator
Some of you may recall that Howard Dean demonstrated
how easy it was to hack the tabulator on television with
Bev Harris of BlackBox Voting.

I haven't heard Dean say anything more about the tabulators.

He is talking about using optical scanning machines
with a paper trail. This is a good start but
as long as centralized proprietary Republican owned
software programs such as GEMS count the votes from
the optical scanning machines, we are in trouble.

Its who counts the votes, stupid.

[FogerRox]

26. If the paper ballots were filled out with pencils-- hmmm

Using a water based marker-- that might dry slower in humid conditions, and then the marker COULD get transfered to the business end of the optical scanner, eventually rendering the reader to be unable to read the ballots--

But if folks were using pencils-- that cant happen.

[Imagevision]

29. It sure seems like they can say anything to the Dems and ya'll would

buy it!

[mikelewis]

31. FYI First Energy is run by a Bush Pioneer - Anthony Alexander Jr.

First Energy runs the power company down there and the CEO is a Bush Pioneer, Anthony Alexander Jr. His father's a good man and a great Democrat but his son has definitely fallen very far from that tree. After watching how he runs his company, it wouldn't surprise me if he killed the power.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

33. didn't they track back the northeastern black out of 2002 to this guy?

[mikelewis]

35. Yep, it was his policies of "don't fix it unless you absolutely have to"

that led to a complete breakdown of the power grid. He fucks his employees and uses shoddy equipment whenever possible. If you google him, you'll find a lot of people don't like his company at all.