What happened in Georgia?

[CitizenPatriot]

This explains a lot:

______________________




The OTHER Election Night Story in Georgia: No Early Votes Included in Reported Results
As the nation watched election returns come in state by state, and national, state and regional television stations began to report the numbers, every major news outlet reported that Georgia had voted heavily for McCain -- all except for the Associated Press Atlanta office, the news organization that is rooted in the print, newspaper business. They held back.

At 10:35 p.m., The Savannah Daily News appears to be the first news organization in Georgia to begin to report that the results made no sense - how could all of the political polls that had Georgia as a McCain/Obama toss up be so wrong? And how could the Secretary of State be reporting that the majority of the votes were in, but the total was just over 2.8 million, when there are more than 4.8 million registered voters in Georgia?

It looked like Senator Saxby Chambliss (R) was handily winning reelection, defeating Jim Martin (D). All of Savannah's TV stations were providing similar analysis.

At 11 p.m., a news analyst at Atlanta's WSB-TV also posted a short story saying that something appeared to be wrong with the election results on the Secretary of State's Web site, noting that early voting figures for metro Atlanta counties did not appear to be in the totals that were being reported.

http://savdailynews.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=19&ArticleID=20488

[MarjorieG]

1. Admitted computer theft by Chambliss in 2002, by programmer. Maybe again?

[CitizenPatriot]

2. of course compter theft

is an issue here...but also, they released the results without the early votes, which were huge here! Obama was leading in early votes. Early votes were majority african american and white females. So, they called the state with a huge percentage of the votes not counted yet.

Early voting favored Obama -- yet the results called yesterday were sans early votes. They are still counting, as far as I know.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

3. CNN has 99 percent of precincts reporting at LINK

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/full/#S

Add Buckley's total to Martin's, and you get MORE than Chambliss has. Thus Chambliss is under 50 percent, and there will be a December 2nd runoff.

"Georgia 2:10 p.m. EST, Nov 5 '08
Chambliss (Incumbent) 1,841,454 50%
Martin 1,727,626 47%
Buckley 126,328 3%
99% of precincts reporting"

[CitizenPatriot]

4. a run off? GREAT news!

well, there's still hope here:-)

Bring it on! Plus that means Obama will come here...We will get a chance to hear him in person!

[conscious evolution]

5. They stole votes from Barr.

Check out the Libertarian candidates vote totals.All of the statewide Libertarian candidates received between 3-5% of the vote.Except for Barr.He only got .07%.
Does anyone here think that anyone who votes for a libertarian for Senate and other state offices is NOT going to vote for the Libertarian candidate for President?
And what about the Repukes who were going to vote for Barr instead of Mccain?You would think there would be a quite a few crossed over to Barr.

[beachmom]

10. No, they didn't and you have zero proof. Take it from me, a phonebanker in GA:

there was no support for Bob Barr.

[Bonn1997]

13. Proof? How can you come up with proof when there's no paper trail of any sort?

As far as phone banking goes, how many people did you call? Did you yourself reach a large enough sample that you would have been able to tell the difference between whether 2.7 versus 0.7%, for example, supported Barr? If you reached only 100 people, that wouldn't be nearly enough. You'd probably have needed several thousand and to have taken careful notes on the results of your phone calls.

[beachmom]

15. I can tell you that the head volunteer of our office predicted 1% for Barr.

And that is where it ended up. We worked a red county ripe for pick ups for Barr. No dice. He entered ALL the data for our office. He would know.

Again, just because you have no paper trail, doesn't mean you can just scream "stolen" for the hell of it. It is obvious that Republican/Libertarian types felt they could afford to punish Chambliss for voting for the bailout, but felt they had to stay in line for McCain. Plus, Palin resonated with the fundies here.

[Bonn1997]

18. Fair enough. It's only because we have this paper-less voting that we even have to speculate

[conscious evolution]

24. Ain't that the truth.

The freakin machines need to go.

[morillon]

29. I'm writing David Scott and John Lewis next week on this very topic.

They need to turn those Diebold pieces of shit into video poker machines. Or jewelry. Or eco building materials. Anything other than voting machines.

[morillon]

31. I was surprised about that, but you're right.

His support in this state has definitely slipped since he was in Congress. I wouldn't have said so a month or two ago, but it turns out he didn't have as much support as I thought. I figured he'd pull close to double digits. Nope.

[CitizenPatriot]

6. good call

this place really is the bastion of election corruption -- as Spoonamore attests to in his videos. Luckily the SOS aide turned in the Diebold machines that were "adjusted" with a device after certification last time -- but Karen Handel was determined to make this a GOP election. they stole it for chambliss last time and so why wouldn't they do it again? the long lines, the purged voters -- and she violated the court order to do that-- she's insane and needs to be recalled.

Thank god Obama didn't need GA -- but we have our eye on Karen.

[RamblingRose]

7. Don't forget the 10,000 flawed ballots in Gwinnett County

10,000 absentee ballots in Gwinnett are flawed
Votes will have to be transferred to new ballots


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Gwinnett County elections officials will have to hand-copy votes from at least 10,000 absentee ballots onto new ballots that can be read by a machine.

The original ballots, designed to be filled out by hand, are flawed because of a printing error. The circle beside the candidate’s name is too thick and somewhat misshapen, and consequently an optical scanning machine won’t be able to read the votes on Election Day.

The county discovered the problem last week during routine testing.

Gwinnett had already mailed out 19,700 flawed ballots before it realized the problem.

Of those, 10,000 have already been marked and sent back by voters, said Lynn Ledford director of Voter Registration and Elections for Gwinnett County.

The printing mistake was not apparent to the naked eye, Ledford said.

The elections office will now have to transfer the votes from those 10,000 ballots onto new ballots so an optical scanning machine can read them, Ledford said. If more of the flawed ballots come back, that number will increase.

County spokesman Joe Sorenson said correcting the errors could be complicated.

“ are going to have to take the bad ballots, take a look at what each choice is, and mark that choice for the second ballot,” Sorenson said. “There will be two sets of eyes on each ballot.”

From 200 to 300 election workers will be dedicated to this process, he said.

“I’ve got to assume we’re going to have to hire more people,” said Sorenson, who didn’t know the anticipated cost for fixing the issue.

But that’s only part of county’s concern. Security is another issue.


more at link

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/gwinnett/stories/2008/10/23/absentee_ballot_flaw.html

[beachmom]

8. The AP finally called Georgia for McCain THIS AFTERNOON.

Pathetic showing by the SoS of Georgia.

[beachmom]

11. Nov. 5, 2008 at 1:50 PM: The AP has finally called Georgia for McCain. Senate will have runoff.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/11/mccain_wins_georgia_senate_rac.php

John McCain has won Georgia's 15 electoral votes, keeping the state in the GOP column for the fourth consecutive presidential election.

Because of an unexpected low turnout in the Atlanta area, The Associated Press waited past Election Day to call the winner until the number of outstanding votes could be verified.

Saxby Chambliss did not meet the 50% threshold, so there will be a runoff Senate election in December.

McCain 52%
Obama 46%

6 points. It was 16 points in 2004.

As to the Senate:

Chambliss 49%
Martin 46%

[Spritz57]

17. How does a runoff work?

[beachmom]

19. It is held in 4 weeks, on I believe Dec. 2nd. It will be Chambliss vs. Martin alone.

A Libertarian was in the race yesterday so that is why Chambliss did not meet the 50% threshold.

The bad thing about it is that we Georgians are going to be treated to sleazy attack ads for the next four weeks.

It is my understanding that the big guns from the Obama campaign will be setting up shop here very soon.

[iceman66]

26. That's great to hear!

Now that the main fight is over, maybe Obama's people will make Chambliss a priority!

[morillon]

30. Maybe Obama will pay Georgia a visit!

I'd take the day off work to go see him.

[CitizenPatriot]

9. boy- what a cluster ____

Karen Handel needs to be RECALLED.

thanks for the tip. What an outrage -- this is just like Fla in terms of having so many different "problems" -- hard to know which one to focus on. Thank god this state wasn't needed, because it is corrupt as all hell.

Let's make it a priority to get that woman out of office. Our SOS must be people who uphold democracy. Why do we even have to say that? How pathetic.

[Clio the Leo]

12. So when are they gonna count them? NT

[CitizenPatriot]

14. see, this still doens't sound right

Obama was leading in the polls by one point here the day before the election. WTF???

Something smells in Denmark...

[beachmom]

16. No, he was not leading by 1 point. The average was about 5 or 6 points for McCain.

Exactly where it ended up. I only know of one poll -- Insider Advantage -- that ever showed Obama in the lead. Most just showed it close or McCain 6 points ahead.

[Awsi Dooger]

21. Final average on Pollster.com had McCain leading by 2.9% in Georgia

49.5 to 46.6. You can see it right now on his site. He's got a table indicating how each state fared in the voting compared to polling.

Georgia was about 2.6% more red than the polling, since McCain won by 5.5%. That's actually low red variance for that state. It is notorious for overstating Democratic support in polling, dating to at least '94. That when I started to compile the numbers.

I won plenty betting McCain to win Georgia. The odds of 1/2 were a joke. It was guaranteed to be closer than normal, but getting over the top was another matter.

Actually, Georgia didn't move much at all in our favor. The partisan index is still lopsided red. Obama won nationally by roughly 6.1% yet McCain won Georgia by 5.5%, meaning Georgia was still 11.6% more Republican than the nation. In 2004, it was Bush 58% to Kerry's 41.4%, with a national margin of Bush winning by 2.46%. So the partisan index (state comparison to national margin) in 2004 was Republican by 14.2%. This year it dropped to 11.6%. All the emphasis in Georgia was worth 2.6%.

[HughMoran]

25. Obama was down by 4% going into election night, 5% if you throw out the one outlier poll

Obama lost by 5.5% - very much on target.

There was nothing fishy here.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/ga/georgia_mccain_vs_obama-596.html

[CitizenPatriot]

20. true, it was only one poll that he was leading in

but those polls also weren't taking into account the 500,000 newly registered (or 400,000 if you only count this year) voters.

the internals done showed he could take GA with those newly registered voters. It also doesn't seem right that she said this was low turn out. Low turn out? with 8 hour lines in Atlanta and 3 hour waits in other cities?

There's a lot that went wrong here and a lot that doesn't add up.

[iceman66]

22. The long lines obviously discouraged turnout,

as was likely the intention all along given this SOS.

Too few voting machines in heavily populated (i.e., Democratic) areas, whether by accident or design, is a form of vote suppression.

We probably would have had a shot in GA, and won VA and FL by wider margins, if not for the lines!

[Orsino]

23. We will never know what happened in Georgia.

Opaque corporate control of the machines guarantees that.

[morillon]

27. There are still large Democratic counties with precincts not totally in.

Bibb, Chatham, Clayton, Dougherty, Douglas, and Richmond are medium-to-large Democratic counties that aren't 100% complete yet, and the two HUGE counties, DeKalb and Fulton, aren't finished, either.

Here's a link to the SoS results page:

http://sos.georgia.gov/elections/election_results/2008_1104/

According to a report on 11 Alive News last night, some of the larger counties had still not reported their early vote totals.

http://www.11alive.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=123175&catid=40

[AtomicKitten]

28. Georgia is a state where votes magically disappear.

[RepublicanElephant]

32. almost as bad as karen "katherine harris" handel was the previous sos....

a dem who thought it was a good idea to put these crap machines all over georgia...
only to be defeated herself.

i hope voter protection is on obama's "top ten things to do in 2009" list.

[CitizenPatriot]

33. election protection

needs to be a priority.

I'm having a meeting with one of the attorneys who worked on the voting issues for the campaign tomorrow, so I'll let you know if I find anything out. I know there were "issues" here yesterday, but compared to what could have happened, it was pretty good. Atlanta is another story, of course. And I don't know how Macon fared.

Yeah, Karen is a problem, along with the Diebold machines, the voter disenfranchisement, the purging, etc.

Not next time...we'll get this crap straightened out.

edited to add: an upthread poster mentioned that all the votes weren't in yet-- I can't believe it! When are they going to be counted? That's crazy. I did hear from a bunch of people who had voted early that the SOS website wasn't registering their vote. I hope that wasn't as widespread as it seemed.