"Nov. 12, 2004 | Brookville, Ind. -- A hand recount of ballots cast using optical scanning technology gave a Democrat enough extra votes to bump a Republican from victory in a county commissioner's race.
The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana's Franklin County.
The recount Thursday pushed Democrat Carroll Lanning from fifth to third in the three-seat commissioners race, while Republican Roy Hall fell to fifth."
Letter of the day
How often have we been told that we shouldn't mix apples and oranges; that the two are not comparable. And still, that's what CNN seems to have done on election night.
If the reports are correct, then the exit polls CNN had commissioned and put up all night were suddenly taken down in the early hours of the morning and "corrected" with numbers that came, not from the mouths of people who had just voted, but from the machines in which their votes were supposed to be accurately recorded.
Whether or not those later numbers are an accurate representation of what the voters did, mixing the information from the mouths of voters with what was spewed out by the machines resulted in, at best, a fruit salad of information; at worst, a mish-mash, since we could no longer tell which was which.
Fortunately, unlike a fruit salad, the ballots on which voters recorded their intent can actually be disaggregated manually and read by individuals whose integrity is not in dispuste. Let's hope the optiscan counties in Florida do that. And soon.
Posted by Hannah at November 13, 2004 08:05 AM