Glocksman wrote:Forgot to add:
Some of my information on this is coming from Washingtonians on another board. If I'm operating off of bad information, please post links.
For example:
These were sealed absentee ballots kept through a reliable chain of custody after they had initially been received by King County
I'm being told the opposite at the other board.
Ok, let me link to this. This shows how some individuals are outright LYING about the facts in the issue in their attempts to get people on their side.
For starters, here's a source that mentions how they were unopened, the number went up after further review of the issue and how many should have been discarded.
The 150 absentee ballots were discovered Friday by King County officials who said they had not been included in the first two ballot counts in the race still undecided more than a month after the election.
The Seattle Times said the unopened ballots were found among other ballots that were discarded due to problems with the signatures.
Here's a description of what happened to the ballots, the point worth noting is the word "filed" they were not thrown in the trash after being initially incorrectly marked invalid.
King County Councilman Larry Phillips brought the problem to Logan's attention Sunday, when he discovered his ballot had been ruled invalid.
Apparently election workers found no match when they checked signatures of Phillips and 560 other King County voters against an electronic database. But instead of setting the ballots aside to be checked against the actual paper registration forms, as they should have been, the ballots were simply filed as invalid.
Let's be clear about these 735 ballots, as all manner of partisan hacks have cast aspersions on them. There is zero evidence they are fraudulent. They were never "missing" and suddenly found by scheming elections officials.
They are absentee ballots still in their original envelopes, still sealed, with the voters' signatures on the outside.
All are either postmarked or dated Nov. 2 or earlier. Nobody has broken the seals to look at the ballots inside (they might all be write-ins for Ron Sims, for all we know).
They were rejected because county employees thought they did not have signatures for those voters, but they failed to check the original paper registration forms.
If the signatures match those of voters on valid registration forms, then how could we not open the envelopes and count the votes?
Get back to us when you have something more concrete than bad vibes.
So you think that this was a victory for 'democracy'?
Similarly, get back to me when you have something besides a strawman. I never said anything of the sort.
You did notice the question mark?
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."- General Sir Charles Napier
He probably did. It's just that rhetorical questions are used to make statements and not actually find answers.
True.
But I also stated that I was operating off of information provided by people on another board and asked for links to any contradicting information.
It wasn't entirely meant to be rhetorical.
Now after reviewing the info provided by Omega18, I'll say the situation doesn't stink quite as badly as I was led to believe.
I'd have been suspicious of it if King happened to be a Repub stronghold and their votes favored Rossi. After what happened here in the 1984 Congressional race, I'm suspicious of any votes that 'appear' after the initial count.
But it appears that my suspicions have no real ground based on Omega's information.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."- General Sir Charles Napier
They didn't cheat. They just happened to find 700+ ballots somewhere in a back room. The fact that the head of the King County Board of Elections is a elected position and the current person in that office is a Democrat should not be taken to mean that they cheated.....
Because it included the votes generated in a back room after the election and presented as "lost" ballots favoring the democRAT?
Ballots are "lost" and later - conveniently - "found" with no chain of evidence or custody. And they're STILL COUNTED?
Maybe the GOP should print up some of their own and "find" their own "lost" ballots like the democRATS did.
Talk about fishy. The guy who "discovered" these ballots (they were all absentee) was a councilman who voted absentee due to the fact that he was busy campaigning for Kerry. Apparently he (along with 573 other people out hundreds of thousands) couldnt figure out how to apply his signature to a ballot. I am so glad that we elect these rocket scientists.
During the hand recount, county workers found 573 ballots that elections officials say were mistakenly rejected because of a problem with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the computer system. Workers then searched a warehouse and found 150 more overlooked ballots from voters with last names beginning with A, B and C.
State GOP spokesman Chris Vance called their discovery weeks after the election "very suspicious." And some Washington state residents who had calmly been watching the recount with confidence in their state's reputation for clean politics were starting to have their doubts.
Up until Wednesday, the 723 King County ballots had not been included in the hand recount, because a lower-court judge granted a Republican request to temporarily block the counting of those votes.
And if you want to put that little exchange between Hemlock and myself into your sig, fix the quote tags.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."- General Sir Charles Napier
They didn't cheat. They just happened to find 700+ ballots somewhere in a back room. The fact that the head of the King County Board of Elections is a elected position and the current person in that office is a Democrat should not be taken to mean that they cheated.....
Because it included the votes generated in a back room after the election and presented as "lost" ballots favoring the democRAT?
Ballots are "lost" and later - conveniently - "found" with no chain of evidence or custody. And they're STILL COUNTED?
Maybe the GOP should print up some of their own and "find" their own "lost" ballots like the democRATS did.
Talk about fishy. The guy who "discovered" these ballots (they were all absentee) was a councilman who voted absentee due to the fact that he was busy campaigning for Kerry. Apparently he (along with 573 other people out hundreds of thousands) couldnt figure out how to apply his signature to a ballot. I am so glad that we elect these rocket scientists.
During the hand recount, county workers found 573 ballots that elections officials say were mistakenly rejected because of a problem with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the computer system. Workers then searched a warehouse and found 150 more overlooked ballots from voters with last names beginning with A, B and C.
State GOP spokesman Chris Vance called their discovery weeks after the election "very suspicious." And some Washington state residents who had calmly been watching the recount with confidence in their state's reputation for clean politics were starting to have their doubts.
Up until Wednesday, the 723 King County ballots had not been included in the hand recount, because a lower-court judge granted a Republican request to temporarily block the counting of those votes.
And if you want to put that little exchange between Hemlock and myself into your sig, fix the quote tags.
Thank you.
I dont' think the signature feature allows a quote in a quote. Deleting it anyways. . . And I will look for those lines in the foreign threads you linked to.
I was going to quote their repliesz and try to teear them new ones.. but insteand just get the the Veigh lover on the line, I need to get his location so I can send my HIT squad.
[quote="HemlockGrey"][quote="Glocksman"]Like I said, it stinks to high heaven.[/quote]
I think you've pretty much precluded yourself from ever making any Vast Right Wing Conspiracy cracks in the future.[/quote]
As perhaps the only Washingtonian to comment on this so far, I'll tell you that I am exceedingly suspicious about all of these recounts. Whether it's incompetence or voter fraud, they both look about the same. I find it highly curious that each time King County recounted, they found a few more "missing" ballots, and always a plausible explanation for why they had gone missing.
In Washington State, the law allows canvassing boards to edit disputed ballots to clarify the intent of the voter, but they must leave the original marks untouched. In fact, King County modified ballots to such an extent that we have no idea how many of the disputed ballots were originally marked. That makes it difficult to track what happened, who did it, and when.
Like I said, whether it's incompetence or fraud, they both look the same from where I'm standing.
In Brazil they say that Pele was the best, but Garrincha was better
We had a statutory system in place that told us what could and should happen in a race that is this close. We have concluded that statutory process, and so long as the Secretary of State finds that all the counties have properly certified their results under this process, we have a winner. Rossi can sue all he wants, but it's probably not going to change the outcome. This is exactly why we had a statutory provision allowing for a hand recount in a county that hadn't certified its results yet.
That's democracy in a society with a stable legal system ... close is ok. It's not preferred, but it's ok. We're not going to be rioting in the streets, we're not going to ask Russia or France to come in and intervene to restore order. Hail Columbia!
[img=right]http://www.tallguyz.com/imagelib/chmeesig.jpg[/img]My guess might be excellent or it might be crummy, but
Mrs. Spade didn't raise any children dippy enough to
make guesses in front of a district attorney,
an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer.
Sam Spade, "The Maltese Falcon" Operation Freedom Fry
