Harris County's botched election

 Houston Public Media:

Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum says his team will be working to sort out the issues that caused problems on election day.

Harris County experienced many issues from polling sites opening late, machine malfunctions, and even some polling sites running out of ballots. Wednesday morning, election workers were still counting emergency ballots at central counting at NRG Arena.

"We will assess our election operations from early voting through election night through today," he said at a Wednesday afternoon presser.

Polling sites were scheduled to open at 7 a.m. but officials said four locations opened late. BakerRipley House on Navigation opened almost 4.5 hours late due to what officials say was a misplaced key that was needed to access the voting machines.

"I understand there was a problem with accessing the equipment from the equipment cabby," Tatum said. "Then I'm told that there was a misplaced key [for] a judge’s box [it] wasn't delivered which then didn't allow that judge to access the equipment."

Tatum said he wasn't sure if the misplaced key accessed all the voting machines or just one particular machine. Once the key was delivered, the judge for that polling location did not have staff.

"Once we did get the key to him as I understand his clerks that were assigned to him – left him," he said.

Harris County had 782 polling locations opened but there's not an exact number on how many polling sites experienced problems and how many machines were down. Tatum said some judges did report to his team about machine problems at their polling sites.

"We saw that there were some scanner problems, the scanner is the device that actually takes an image of the ballot and records the ballot," he said. "We saw that there were some duo problems – the duo is the device where the voter actually makes their selections and prints their selections onto the ballot, we saw that there were some ballot jams."
...

In Washington County where I vote the paper ballot is placed into the scanner by the voter after they finish marking the ballot.  It has always worked pretty smoothly when I voted.  There is a woman in charge of the voting who does an excellent job.  Back when I lived in Harris county, I do not recall any problem with voting.  At that time, Republicans were running the county instead of the current Democrats.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more