Florida Voters Sign Sworn Statements as to How They Voted

We need those precinct results in order to compare them with our poll results, AND the citizens need those precinct results to verify that they were not changed later. There are absentee and early votes and provisional votes added in, either before election day or after, but the machine count of every voter who voted in person on each optical scanner is a fact, recorded on the memory card of each machine. Unless the memory card is lost, or altered by pre- or post-software manipulation, it is a permanent record, until erased, of how the votes were cast on election day, NOT COUNTING absentees, early, and provisional votes. This is a record that MUST be available to the citizens for an honest election. Citizen pollsters, as well as official poll workers, should be able to check that the number of voters that day matches what they recorded in the poll books and on their machine counts. That is the most basic of checks and balances. An audit or poll or partial recount checks to see if the sample of paper ballots counted is of the same percentages as the official count. To do that, an accurate precinct count and tally must be available to the citizens.

One of the few citizen observers who watched the Sarasota county elections board counting the ballots on election night, that is, she was able to see , through a glass window, the central tabulator reading the memory cards from each Optical Scan machine from each precinct, reported that she saw a tabulator failure, causing the officials to override the machine count, and enter vote tallies by hand, as guided by the vendor of the voting machines. (This was Jeannie Dean who is will be posting her video footage of this incident.)

WHO is watching the vote count? Where are the citizens overseeing our elections? The activist observer who reported this to me said the press and party officials were all talking among themselves about trivia and were schmoozing socially, while the count was being manipulated.

Was fraud being committed? Were the totals from each precinct machine being entered correctly? Who on earth can tell? NO real citizen oversight was allowed. And WHEN will the precinct totals be released? The Sarasota chief election official said it may be days. Meanwhile citizen pollsters will sit on their data, not wanting to allow the official precinct data possibly to be changed to match it. The exit poll canary who can help signal fraud will be silenced for now, but is still alive and awaiting some fresh air and the light of transparent elections in Florida and in the rest of the country.

Marj Creech, Election Defense Alliance, Sarasota, Florida, February 4, 2008

See also http://www.projectvotecount.com/ and http://www.recallvotingmachines.com