Senator Doug Henry's lead over challenger Jeff Yarbro just shrank from 13 votes to 11 votes after an Election Commission audit turned up a previously uncounted voting machine. What? How do you miss counting the votes off of an election machine?
This should be totally unacceptable. This does not inspire confidence in the electoral process. The Election Commission, and maybe the Metro Council, should have formal hearing and devise systems of checking and double checking to ensure that this cannot happen. How many total votes were cast on this machine? How did this happen? This only came to light because of the closeness of this particular race. How many other voting machines did the election commission fail to count? Maybe it is time for new leadership at the election commission. Every vote should be counted!
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I've worked as a machine operator in a few elections, and you don't count "machines". Each machine operator has a module that is inserted in the machine once they get the voter certificate. At the end of the day, each machine is closed. One of those modules is designated as the master and is inserted into each machine to close it (I guess it's possible they didn't close one of the machines). Those modules are supposed to be locked up and taken by two election officials to the election office.
ReplyDeleteI recommend that everyone who is concerned about the process take a few turns at working as election officials. They're always short handed (and perhaps that's what contributed to this issue).