See-sawing....
The recount of the 2nd District election is well under way, with the margin separating three-term incumbent Republican Congressman Rob Simmons and Democratic challenger Joe Courtney making some minor adjustments.
Simmons picked up one vote Thursday night in Hebron, but then lost it Friday morning in Columbi'a recount. Courtney picked up an extra vote in his hometown of Vernon when a provisional ballot was added to Tuesday's initial count - and both he and Simmons each benefitted from two provisional ballots added to the mix in Pomfret.
Provisional ballots are filled out by voters at the polls on Election Day when they believe their names were mistakenly left off the official voter's list. The votes are counted later once it is determined they are in fact registered voters.
Bottom line tally - as of 3:45 p.m. - Courtney holds a 168-vote lead over Simmons.
Today and the weekend will be busy - but the real crunch comes Monday when 35 of the 65 towns in the district will conduct recounts. The deadline to complete the process is midnight Wednesday, but it now appears we should be completely finished by Tuesday night.
Simmons picked up one vote Thursday night in Hebron, but then lost it Friday morning in Columbi'a recount. Courtney picked up an extra vote in his hometown of Vernon when a provisional ballot was added to Tuesday's initial count - and both he and Simmons each benefitted from two provisional ballots added to the mix in Pomfret.
Provisional ballots are filled out by voters at the polls on Election Day when they believe their names were mistakenly left off the official voter's list. The votes are counted later once it is determined they are in fact registered voters.
Bottom line tally - as of 3:45 p.m. - Courtney holds a 168-vote lead over Simmons.
Today and the weekend will be busy - but the real crunch comes Monday when 35 of the 65 towns in the district will conduct recounts. The deadline to complete the process is midnight Wednesday, but it now appears we should be completely finished by Tuesday night.
posted by Ray Hackett at 3:50 PM
1 Comments:
The numbers will likely be way way way off what the Sec of the State reported they were. I heard her on the radio and she sounded really annoyed that she was forced to recount the votes. Of course they could mostly go Courtney’s way making his lead even bigger.
At the risk of offending the easily offended, many of these poll workers really don't know what they are doing. I recall in 1994 the numbers in Norwich alone were off by hundreds. Some of the hapless poll workers fed some of the ballots through the machine twice. Don’t ask me how they managed to do that; I have no idea. Nor was the error caught by the clueless town clerk who should have spotted it. The number of votes cast did not match the number of people who voted. That’s her job and she blew it.
Norwich was using these crappy optical reader machines. The Sec. of the State at the time wanted to try them.
--- And we have done very nicely without them ever since.
The traditional green ugly machines are the best voting machine ever invented. They never ever screw up (well almost never) they are 100 percent invulnerable to fraud and they last 50 years or more.
I am doing a term paper on the Florida Election in 2000 and I can tell you everyone learned the wrong lesson from that disaster. We need simple easy to use voting machines that use gears – not electricity.
I don’t think you will find one solitary error on any of the machine counts in all 60-something towns. If they were using these green machines in Florida there would have been no controversy.
But these optical scanner junk machines (which they used in Florida in 2000) have always been junk. They have an error rate (unlike the green machines) even if all votes are cast perfectly. The manufacturer will tell you that though it isn’t a high number.
And if the voter does not fill out the card absolutely perfect than their vote will not count. Why some view these things as superior to what we have used in the past is a complete mystery to me.
Of course the new machines leave us wide open to fraud. All you need is an eraser.
I was against the electronic touch screens too until I found out the Sec of the State wanted to switch to these things so there would be a paper trail. I don’t know which is worse. I think we are making a big mistake.
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