I demand a recount in District 62. Too bad that’s impossible.
It’s as if the two people responsible for ensuring fair elections in the state of Tennessee – Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins – took all the votes from yesterday’s special election, counted them secretly in a smoke-filled back room, announced the results, and then burned the ballots so no one could ever count them again.
In the year 2000 (almost 10 years ago!), Microvote, the company that provides paperless electronic voting machines to two of the counties that make up District 62, Bedford and Rutherford, described the “miracle” that is their products’ recount feature:
Counting the ballots is as simple as pulling the memory cartridge out of the unit (it’s a smart card in the new Infinity) and inserting it into a reader hooked up to the PC handling the vote tally. Recounting can be just as simple; MicroVote maintains that the Florida recounts that dragged on for days could be done in a morning on a MicroVote system.
What’s most important about the recounts: “We’ve had many recounts up here in Lake County, but nothing where the machine vote ever changed,” Fajman says [Michelle Fajman, supervisor of elections in Lake County].
That’s right! The recount from the machine never changes. And that’s not a good thing considering we have no idea if the voter’s intent was correctly recorded by the software in the first place. And if the voters intent was not recorded correctly we will never know because Hargett and Goins, the guys running our elections, are not allowed to see the proprietary software – a.k.a. the secret secret smoke-filled back room – that counts the votes.
The Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (the paper ballot bill), which was passed almost unanimously in 2008 by both the House and Senate and which Secretary of State Tre Hargett says we cannot implement, would allow us to vote on paper ballots thereby capturing the actual intent of the voter. Optical scan machines would then count the paper ballots. In case of a recount, the paper ballot would become the ballot of record.
And yeah, you might actually get a different total when recounted – but it would be accurate.
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