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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the unverified-voting dept.

The Boston Globe reports [boston.com]

[Jim] Gilmore, the former Virginia governor [and current GOP presidential candidate], ran a near-nonexistent campaign [theatlantic.com], hovered at zero percent in the polls, repeatedly failed to qualify for the undercard debates, and finally dropped out of the race in mid-February. You'd be forgiven if you didn't know he even ran for president.

Yet, according to city tallies in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Gilmore received 366 votes, good for 47.2 percent of the total. Donald Trump came in second with 18.8 percent of the vote, followed by Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, who both dropped out of the race in the last few weeks.

Alas, Chelsea did not prove to be an indicator of Gilmore's success. He received just 1,080 votes in the entire state of Massachusetts.

So, WTF??

Advocate for clean, verifiable elections, Brad Friedman blogs [bradblog.com][1]

[Today, in our daily Bradcast,] we also look at a few more of the more than 2,000 reports [866ourvote.org] of voting problems that came into the non-partisan Election Protection coalition yesterday; More touch-screen trouble, this time in TN [wate.com]; And what the hell happened [theatlantic.com] in Chelsea, MA, where former VA Gov. Jim Gilmore(!?!), who dropped out of the race weeks ago, crushed the Republican Primary competition, at least according to the paper-ballot optical-scan computers that tallied the results last night?...

The paper ballots in Chelsea were initially tabulated by the same type of op-scan systems used in states all over the country and shown to be capable of flipping elections without notice in the jaw-dropping finale [youtube.com] of HBO's Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy [hackingdemocracy.com].[2] Today, the numbers have now been "corrected" [PDF] [chelseama.gov] by the clerk's office [Update: The link to the document at the Chelsea government site is now broken, so here's a copy of the PDF [bradblog.com] that had been linked there] and, apparently [bostonglobe.com], chalked up to "the computer system that reported the results". Ya don't say. Was it anything like this similar failure [bradblog.com] from Stoughton, WI in 2014?

[1] Jeez, Brad. Half a megabyte per page of text? Really?? (A 404 page that's 245kB is really stupid too.)
[2] A site that uses iframes. How quaint.

Does it make any sense to keep machines in the loop? They seem to be just one more source of miscounts (and, perhaps, mischief).

Original Submission