GOP NAME MISSING, VOTING MACHINES MALFUNCTION
Anomalies hit midterm races across America
Dozens of precincts across Virginia on Tuesday reported voting machine troubles, while in Colorado the state’s election system had to be rebooted, and in Texas the Republican candidate’s name was found to be missing from the ballots in one county.
The incidents, and others that have arisen Tuesday, raised questions about the integrity of the American election system, which has taken a bludgeoning in recent years because of incidents of fraud.
In Virginia Beach, officials with the campaign of Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Va., reported voting machine problems already had encompassed 43 precincts, according to WVEC-TV in Norfolk.
“Every error is going against my campaign and in favor of my challenger,” Rigell said at a news conference.
Fox News reported Rigell’s campaign produced a video taken in Virginia Beach in which an electronic machine appears to record a vote for Rigell, only to have the vote switch to the challenger, Democratic Party candidate Suzanne Patrick.
Representatives of the Virginia Department of Elections told Watchdog.org they are aware of the issue and said faulty-touch-screens on the AccuVote TSX Touch Screen voting machines were being removed.
Crist complaint denied
In Florida, Democratic gubernatorial challenger Charlie Crist lost a bid to extend voting in Broward County. The Circuit Court for the 17th Judicial Circuit turned down an emergency motion filed to extend voting hours in Broward from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Crist’s filing came an hour before the polls were scheduled to close. His campaign cited a polling station at Croissant Park Elementary School that was found to be offline for over an hour and a half in the morning, causing major delays among voters seeking to cast a ballot before going to work.
Crist’s campaign also cited electronic voting machine malfunctions in precincts throughout Broward County that were unable to update addresses, preventing some people from voting.
The legal complaint filed by the Crist campaign alleged the confusion resulted from recent re-precincting that was not adequately programmed into electronic voting machines prior to the election.
Connecticut malfunction
In Connecticut, a Hartford Superior Court judge has ordered two Hartford polling places to stay open an extra half hour, after Democratic Party Gov. Dannel P. Malloy filed suit, arguing reported delays in the opening of the Hartford polling places Tuesday morning prevented some voters in the overwhelmingly Democratic capital city from casting ballots.
Malloy’s complaint alleged that at least 12 precincts in Hartford had failed to open on time, and voters in at least nine of the city’s 24 precincts were turned away for between 30 and 90 minutes.
Attorneys for Republican challenger Tom Foley objected to extending the voting hours, arguing Republican observers had been to several Hartford precincts throughout the morning and observed no problems.
Malloy campaign spokesman Mark Bergman said in a statement to the press, “We are pleased the court has decided to give every voter in Hartford who wants to cast a ballot the opportunity to vote.”
Oleg Vazquez, the Democratic register of voters, blamed delays on staff reductions and budget cuts that left her without sufficient staff to prepare the lists by manually checking off the names of 2,000 voters that had already voted by absentee ballots.
“It’s easy to point fingers of what went wrong, but we need to understand that when you cut budgets, and we are dealing with so much in a governor’s race, we are going to have challenges,” Vazquez told the Connecticut Mirror.
Vasquez said her staff of six is less than half what it was in the last mid-term election.
“It’s no comparison for a city of 65,000 voters,” she said. “We don’t have the manpower.”
The Real Clear Politics average had Malloy leading Foley by 1.3 percent in an election considered “too close to call.”
The Connecticut Mirror reported that during the last election, Malloy won 15,753 votes in Hartford, compared to 2,043 votes for Foley, with voting turnout at 39 percent.
Colorado reboot, Texas two-step
In Colorado, a Denver Post report said the Statewide Colorado Registration and Election system, used to keep track of voters, had to be “rebooted” to “fix technical problems that delayed voting all day.”
Reports from Colorado noted a dispute over election watchers in Boulder, where Republicans accused county clerk Hillary Hall of refusing to comply with election law transparency requirements by denying watchers reasonable access as they observed the count.
There have been numerous reports of electronic machines tallying a vote for a Democrat when someone picks a Republican candidate.
The London Daily Mail reported accusations that in the third-most populous county in Texas, Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott’s name was left off at least one touch-screen ballot machine.
An Instagram photo of a Bexar County machine shows the Republican slot is taken by David Dewhurst, the 2012 failed GOP candidate for lieutenant governor.
The Daily Mail said Logan Churchwell, communications director at the conservative True the Vote organization, confirmed Bexar County has received “additional complaints” and that “they are currently investigating how widespread the matter is.”
It’s unclear how many votes for Dewhurst were recorded before the machine was taken out of service, the paper said. Election officials said Texas election law bars them from assigning Dewhurst’s votes to Abbott.
Holder’s troops
Columnist Thomas Sowell warned that election results may not reflect what the voters decided.
“One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting,” he said.
WWMT-TV reported the U.S. Attorney’s Office was open for reports of election fraud. According to the Hill, Attorney General Eric Holder’s troops were dispatched to 18 states, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, to watch for “intimidation, discrimination or obstruction.”
WND reported last week a study put numbers to the claim that vote fraud by non-U.S. citizens in the 2008 presidential election handed the White House to Barack Obama.
The study authored by Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha and David C. Earnest, who are affiliated with Old Dominion and George Mason Universities, found the number of non-citizen voters “could range from just over 38,000 at the very minimum to nearly 2.8 million at the maximum.”
Of the non-citizens who voted in 2008, the study found “81.8 percent reported voting for Barack Obama compared to 17.5 percent for John McCain.”
The tendency of non-citizens to vote for Democrats was confirmed two years later.
“Similarly in 2010, 53.8 percent of non-citizens reported voting for the Democratic House candidate while 30.7 percent indicated that they voted for the Republican,” the study said.
The results affirmed the contention of many, including the Washington watchdog Judicial Watch, that a “large number of non-citizens cast ballots in U.S. elections, and it’s possible that the illegal votes were responsible for President Obama’s 2008 victory.”
Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, the large-scale academic survey found “in fact, enough ineligible voters cast ballots in 2008 to conceivably account for Democratic victories in a few close elections,” Judicial Watch said in a report on the study.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the study confirms Judicial Watch’s “working theory that foreign nationals illegally vote in federal elections in large numbers and have allowed Democrats, including this president, to steal elections.”
“This is why the left does not want voter ID, loves same-day registration, by mail voting, etc., and craves amnesty and open borders,” Fitton said. “It is not about the Hispanic vote – it is about the illegal alien vote (and the legal alien vote), it is about stealing elections. Makes all the talk about targeting, messaging, issues, candidates and policy seem quaint.”
In Maryland, a watchdog group already sued the state over allegations of “massive and ongoing fraudulent voting by non-U.S. citizens.”
And the president’s response to concerns about the integrity of the election ballot in the U.S., meanwhile, has been to joke about it.
At an appearance in Wisconsin recently, he reminded voters of their civic duty.
“You can only vote once – this isn’t Chicago, now,” he said at a political rally.
WND has reported extensively on efforts to combat fraud through voter ID laws.
While Obama’s Justice Department had fought the voter ID laws in court, the president recently affirmed the laws don’t stop minorities from voting.
“The bottom line is, if less than half of our folks vote, these laws aren’t preventing the other half from not voting. The reason we don’t vote is because people have been fed this notion that somehow it’s not going to make a difference. And it makes a huge difference,” Obama said.
“If we have a high turnout in North Carolina, then we will win. If we have a high turnout in Georgia, we will win. If we have a high turnout in Colorado, we will win. So, across the board, it is important for us to take responsibility and not give away our power,” he said.
Obama himself presented his driver’s license so poll workers could verify his identity when he voted in Chicago on Oct. 20.
One example of the need for voter ID was the discovery by Board of Elections officials in the Bronx that 850 New Yorkers registered to vote who purportedly were alive when Abraham Lincoln was president, the New York Post reported.
Board members said people apparently didn’t provide their birthdays when registering to vote, with some simply writing “21+.”
The Texas attorney general assembled a detailed list of evidence in his response to the DOJ’s latest attack on Texas voting laws.
“Evidence … shows that Attorney General Holder’s list of voters who lack government issued photo identification is fatally flawed because DOJ’s list includes dead voters, failed to exclude non-Texas residents, and did not attempt to match voters with photo ID databases maintained by the federal government – such as the State Department’s passport database or the Department of Defense’s military identification database,” the report said.
The DOJ’s list of voters who allegedly “lack photo identification” includes 50,000 dead voters, 330,000 voters over 65 who can vote by mail without ID and “countless” voters who actually have a government-issued photo ID but who were improperly included on the DOJ’s no-identification list, the Texas report said.
Among those on the no-ID list were state Elections Director Keith Ingram, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, former Sen. Phil Gramm, state Sen. Leticia Van De Putte and former President George W. Bush.
In this year’s election, guerrilla journalist James O’Keefe of Project Veritas revealed pro-Democrat field workers in Colorado discussing ways to commit vogter fraud.
Another report on O’Keefe’s work found a Texas organization may have failed to take any action regarding the “admission” of an undercover volunteer that she broke multiple election laws.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/gop-name-missing-voting-machines-malfunction/#uE5b5eOOz1krZCwW.99
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