Exclusive: PA's Results Website Listed 3 Obama Entries, w/ 3 Differing Totals on Election Night

[BradBlog]

Exclusive: PA's Primary Results Website Listed Obama Three Times, With Three Differing Totals on Election Night
Oddity, Which Applied Only to Obama, Never Occurred Before, Remains Unexplained, But 'Didn't Make a Difference' in Final Results, According to State Official Who Confirmed the Anomaly...

Early on election night last Tuesday, with just 18.07% of the unofficial returns from the Pennsylvania Primary in, astute BRAD BLOG reader Matt Sircely (who was aware enough to save off the HTML page locally!) noticed the following oddity on the official Dept. of State website results page...



Note the three different sets of bars and percentages representing Obama's tally. The problem did not occur for any other candidate, as seen on the full web page, which was noticed early in the evening, and saved locally by the alert reader.

Sircely called the PA Dept. of State to try and get an explanation of what caused the problem seen above. The spokesperson confirmed the problem, which only appears to have affected Obama, and had never happened for anybody else in any previous elections, before she added: "it didn't make a difference though."

(Much more, including audio from Sircely's call to the DoS spokesperson, included at the link below)...

FULL STORY, PHONE CALL AUDIO: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5925

[chill_wind]

1. K/R. n/t

[AtomicKitten]

2. To the Greatest Page.

Great work. Thanks.

[TheZug]

3. Move along, nothing to see here.

[BuyingThyme]

4. How do you know there wasn't more than one Barack Obama?

[JMDEM]

5. It looks to me like...

They may have inadvetently put some county results up with the state-wide results at that point for Obama.

[VenusRising]

6. What a weird phone call that was.

The operator tried to explain it away and then says she has no idea because she's not a technician. Yet she knows it made no difference? How does she know if she's not a tech and no one else had called about it? Sounds like a pick up game of CYA.

[bluesxtreme]

7. it affected both candidates

When I was refreshing the pages during the primary some updates showed Clinton with three totals and Obama with three. Must be a software glitch. The numbers were still correct tho.

[yodermon]

8. I remember seeing that too.

5 minutes (or so) later, when I refreshed the page, it was back to normal. 0<o

[SoonerPride]

9. At another point there were 3 Hillary clintons on the screen. I know, because I saw it.

It was even discussed on this site.

Glitch, nothing else.

[catgirl]

10. Ah, the ole glitch

I don't trust glitches.

[SoonerPride]

14. You know what glitch rhymes with, right?

Hillary.

(That's an old Barbara Bush joke, sorry)

[FunkyLeprechaun]

11. I saw the same thing

Even the Republicans got the same glitch. John McCain got 3 different bars as well.

[quakerboy]

12. It did NOT apply only to Obama

I was refreshing like crazy, and I saw it happen to Hillary's numbers first, at around 10% reporting, if I recall, 3 Hillary numbers to Obamas one. I didn't think anything of it (other than data entry issue) because:

1: the larger number was Hillary's vote count from before the most recent update
2: the smaller number added to the larger number gave the same percentage as my calculations based on the reported votes gave to within a .1%

Also, it was fixed on the next update. Only to happen again a few updates later to Obama. And at one point there were 2 Hillary numbers and 3 Obama numbers. I wish I knew how to do screen shots so I could show you that one.

It is also interesting to note that all the Obama lines in the screenshot are different by only .03%. And in the case of that screenshot, given those vote totals, the correct %'s would be Hillary:92.9% Barack 47.1%, so any error was in Barack's favor on that one, given that each of his %'s were higher than that.

But if you added them together, they always came up to the right proportion and a number very similar to that shown by any of the major media outlets (although they were generaly a few percent behind the media, which I found odd.)

So I have to disagree with you on this one. There may have been a machine problem when the voting was occuring, but this was just a computer oddity that did not help or hurt or effect anyone at the end of the day.

[SoonerPride]

13. How to do screenshots

I wish I knew how to do screen shots so I could show you that one.


1. Hit Ctrl button AND Print Screen button at smae time.
2. Open Paint (or similar graphics program)
3. Hit Ctrl+V (or paste).
4. Your screen catpure is now in a graphical form that you save, edit, publish to photobucket.com etc.

[BradBlog]

15. We're trying to confirm...

Have gotten other similar reports to that, quakerboy. We're trying to confirm with the PA DoS and will update the article appropriately with that info...

Thanks!

[quakerboy]

17. Yup. It looked a little odd when you first looked at it

But I quickly realized it didn't effect the numbers any in the end.

[FedoraLV]

16. Wow

that's odd.

-FedoraLV