Saturday, November 20, 2010

Two new voting machines were located last night in Buffalo

Two new voting machines were located last night in Buffalo, according to Sen.-elect Mike Gianaris, a Democratic attorney helping his party’s efforts in ballot counting.

Incumbent Democratic Sen. Antoine Thompson trails GOP challenger Mark Grisanti by 821 votes, but Gianaris said the new voting machines and how they’ve been handled are a “total disaster” and “complete mess,” adding that lawyers for Thompson are considering legal action that might force a complete recount of paper ballots optically scanned by the machines.

This would involve an amount of paper not seen in 50 years; elections in recent New York history have until this year been conducted with mechanical voting machines, not electronic machines that scan paper ballots. Such a recount would take a long time, to the dismay of people hoping the Senate will be clearly decided before January, when it is set to reconvene.

Capitol Confidential

HAT TIP: Legal Insurrection

I've been waiting to see if this story was going to be picked up by the MSM. It hasn't.

One of the major issues that neither our media nor our political parties address is the transparency and competence of our elections. It is relatively simple to have fair and honest elections and yet we do everything we can to complicate matters and to bring the fairness of the elections into play.

For more reading:
Key New York Races Remain Undecided

3 comments:

Gilbert Midonnet said...

This is interesting. No mention of this outside of the article. You would think that if this was true we would hear more about it.

Anonymous said...

its not true. its more bull being spread by the fascist blogosphere

The Classical Liberal said...

It may be bull. I haven't seen it reported in any major paper or organization. The comment by Austin Shafran, the Senate Democratic spokesman, is damning:

"“Despite clear regulations regarding how voting machines are to be handled after the close of polls, new machines continue to appear. Where did they come from? Who had access to them? How do entire machines disappear for nearly 3 weeks in an election this close? The lack of answers to these questions is appalling and casts a cloud of uncertainty that will taint the integrity of the election results if left unanswered."

But why, if this is true, don't we see this story reported elsewhere? Why don't we at least see the quote by Austin Shafran elsewhere? He is the Senate Democratic spokesman but the quote may not be his; it may be made up.

True or not, and I'm beginning to be suspicious, the gist of the post is that we need to be more open in our elections. We need to do what we can to remove fraud, and the appearance of fraud.

If the population doesn't have confidence in our electoral process we will quickly head to violence. At that time simple measures will no longer be sufficient.

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