Submitted by Kahuna, Feb 21, 2008 11:44

I am a Poll Inspector here in Manhattan and it is easy enough to see how the error was made. This is from the New York Post and its sums up the situation nicely: Doug Kellner, the Democratic co-chair of the state Board of Elections, said a report that Obama received not a single vote in about 80 of the city's 6,106 election districts was no reason to suspect a conspiracy. Kellner attributed the wrong figures to transcription errors by cops who recorded and transmitted the data on primary night — and, he noted, they'd committed similar goofs before. Hillary Rodham Clinton had the first position on voting-machine ballots. Obama was way over in the fifth position. In between were Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and John Edwards, with Dennis Kucinich in the sixth spot. All but Clinton and Obama had dropped out, but too late to have their names removed. Kellner figures that when the other four received no votes, those zeroes often mistakenly ended up under Obama's name. "The way the ballot was laid out," he said, "the likelihood of a zero's going in the Obama column was a lot greater than a zero's going in the Clinton column." ....In the Post article the cops are given, I believe, a bum rap. It is, in my opinion, more likely that a Poll Worker made the mistake, in either reading the numbers off the mechanical counters of the voting machine, or another Poll Worker writing down the those results in the wrong order on the tally sheets. It would be interesting to learn if the "missing" votes appeared under some other candidate's name.

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