What’s Happening in Minnesota
The conservative Power Line blog published an email from a reader who served as an election judge on November 4 for a precinct in Hennepin County, Minnesota. The reader writes:
As “machine judge” it was my duty to set up and take down the voting machine. I still find it very surprising that there has been no attention to the issue pertaining to problems with transmitting the election results in Hennepin county. I followed up with other city authorities and confirmed what I had heard.
The way the process is to work is that the voting machine or optical scanner is set up in the morning and a tape is run that is left in the machine showing a zero sum total for all the candidates. The polls are then opened and the ballots are fed in throughout the day. There is a counter on the machine which shows how many ballots have been counted, so that a comparison to the number of ballots used can be made. At the end of the day, the polling location is closed, and the absentee ballots are then addressed and fed into the machine.
Once all this is done, we must close out the totals. This entails a number of steps, one of which is transmitting the results. There is a modem in each of the voting machines which can dial up the county and send the results before the official tape is printed within the machine. This offers a level of security as the results are now off site, and the Official Tape with the totals is still at the precinct.
What happened on election night was Hennepin County set up the wrong IP address for all the machines in the county. There was no way to transmit the results to a secure off site location. Instead all the precinct’s needed to pull the electronic cards out of the machine, along with the tape, and head to City Hall to consolidate and then have them sent to the County. This means that one person had all the voting results and ballots in their possession for that precinct. So it certainly dropped the level of security a level.
So in my mind the process was not followed, and the integrity of the procedure was flawed, if not corrupted. I personally recorded the totals from my precinct to view and ensure they were recorded properly, however some judges after working 16 hours, may not have felt the need to be as diligent, nor hang around to the very end. A cynic could say something could have been swapped out in the process.
Someone should be asking Hennepin County officials and [Minnesota Secretary of State] Mark Ritchie, why the transmission of votes from these machines did not work. and how can they ensure the integrity of all the vote totals without this added step. I really believe this needs to be addressed. This system did not work as it was designed and someone needs to explain why.
One gets the distinct impression that the first – to help Democrat Al Franken to ‘win’ – is in.
“This system did not work as it was designed and someone needs to explain why.”
Yes, but the state should concentrate on getting an accurate count as a priority and apportion blame later.
My friend who’s responsible for the voting machinery in a large Texas county had to laugh when I told him that I didn’t see his name in the paper after the election. I wouldn’t want to be the fall guy in Minn.
As a former resident of Hennepin County, which is the most liberal county in what is now the only district in the nation represented by a Muslim, I can assure you the voters there went for Franken. Therefore if this mess-up was deliberate (which I doubt), it certainly was not to “help Franken win.”