U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
60%
40%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
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(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
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(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
30%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
50%
40%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
December 18, 2007 07:12 PM UTC
46 Comments
a perfect opportunity to go back to low tech paper ballots. Not that they are fool proof either but much more difficult to mess with on a massive scale than with these machines.
..the level of freak out over this if Republicans had won the Governor’s office or picked up some seats?
Our ears would be bleeding from the shrieks.
One group seems to feel so entitled to power that when they lose an election, it simply must have been stolen. The other group doesn’t seen to handle election losses like that.
How’s that?
There are well documented irregularities when one side wins, at least in recent years, but not when the other side wins.
Can you show me where that’s documented by an impartial investigation? Because I’ve only seen lots of allegations that aren’t supported by independent inquiries from both the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Whereas there have been at least 16 convictions related to ACORN’s actual voter fraud.
….which has never been great, there were something like 135 substantiated large scale icidences where voting or tabulating machines made errors in 2000. Oddly, all of them favored Bush.
135:0 is close to a smoking gun.
Are you going to get any time at Xmas to sit in the sun and enjoy a Dominican (cigar)?
Documented by an impartial investigation? Not likely. But things were definitely odd enough in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 that it takes a leap of faith to conclude that they were fairly conducted.
I’m not going to say anything foolish like the Dems are always clean and only the ‘pubs get up to monkey business – the 1960 election is well known to have been as flawed as 2000. But your implication that it’s little more than whining on the part of the Dems isn’t based on a good look at the merits of the allegations.
I suggest this article at Wikipedia on Ohio in 2004 (recommended with all the usual caveats, plus the admission that I haven’t followed up on the references). If you can counter with a recent example of a narrow statewide Democratic victory with comparable issues affecting Republican-majority precincts and counties, but with a graceful concession by the GOP candidate, I’ll concede your original point.
And New Mexico.
Oh happy day!!!
I just woke up from a nightmare
We aren’t in Iraq.
We kept the pressure on Al Qaeda and caught Bin Laden at Tora Bora.
We got the palestinians and isrealis to the table.
We supported Khatami.
We made meaningful progress on climate crisis.
We adressed china trade imbalances and violations.
We balanced the budget.
We gave Paris Hilton a few less tax cuts.
Oh thank you are long national nightmare is over.
Just kidding. BTW did you ever see the family guy where Peter not going out with Lois changed all sorts of things including the outcome of the 2000 election? Funny stuff.
What was the premise?
I hope someone (my wife) buys me the complete set of episodes…
I might be making a trip to the video store 🙂
Lois ended up marrying quagmire–priceless
What year and what race? The 2000 presidential election? Were the irregularities comparable?
Serious questions here – I’m kinda in and out and don’t have too much time to do my own research.
There were irregularities, like massive amounts of ballots that just “happened” to “appear” from heavily Democrat counties that tilted the state away from Bush. There were others, but that’s the biggest that stuck out in my mind. Similar stuff as to what happened in Washington’s 2004 gubernatorial election or Washington State’s 2000 Senatorial election.
But Florida was overshadowing things and Republicans didn’t pursue it since they were making the argument that Dems should drop the Florida issue.
Where things seemed to go the opposite way. NM has some pretty obvious ongoing problems, apparently.
You’re not going to convince me of anything about the WA 2004 election – that battle was tried and lost by the GOP candidate.
After how many recounts?
and there were two recounts. The first was mandatory, the second was paid for by the Dems, as allowed under state law. (The tab reverted back to the state, again per state law, when the outcome came in the Dems’ favor.)
What makes WA a closed case was the fact that the GOP sued in a friendly venue and got a ruling that made it so clear that they had no case that they didn’t bother appealing. They chose a court in a ‘pub county with a reliably conservative judge, and he minced no words in his ruling.
I’ll concede the point in the case of NM, but PR makes the point that it went the other way in 2004, and I’ll point out that few electoral votes were riding on the outcome either way – certainly not enough to change the outcome nationally, unlike FL in 2000 and OH in 2004.
In 2000 New Mexico went for Gore by less than 500 votes
In 2004 Bush won by around 6000. That’s close but that’s not one “opps we forgot to count that box”
But I see your point about Washington. There really wasn’t anything Republicans didn’t try to clear up that one.
Oh, just remembered the 1996 Senate race in Louisiana-sorry about that 🙂
Alright, I’m being kind of snarky, but Louisiana is one of those states that might as well be its own country for all the cultural differences between it and the rest of the union including their neighbors. Shit, they elected David Duke and William Jefferson – enough embarrassment for both parties to live down. And don’t forget their legal system being based on the Napoleonic code and their attitudes toward alcohol. (As something of a libertarian as I can be regarding alcohol and drug laws, there’s something shocking about being able to buy a daiquiri and walk down the street with it and it’s all perfectly legal, and don’t get me started on 24 hour bars…)
Has a special place in my heart. I served a majority of my mission in Louisiana, and I actually served in the town where Earl K and Huey P Long were from. They had a political museum there that I visited just about every week. Good stuff. I learned a lot about Louisiana politics from the old-timers there.
Also, one of my love handles is from Louisiana.
Anyway, back to the point…while Louisiana has ample examples of embarassments for both parties, at least Duke never went to Congress. 🙂
I certainly wasn’t using that as a “recent” example. It popped into my head as I was typing so I threw it out there. But you want to see dirty elections? Look at Louisiana. It and of itself it makes all the arguments for and against any kind of election reform you can think of.
Keep in mind that Huey Long really was a dictator, benevolent or not. He effectively was still governor when he was in the Senate. That itself speaks volumes about Louisiana politics.
..explains a lot about why the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana were incapable of responding to Katrina. They knew for 100 years that mother nature was eventually going to ‘flush the toilet’ (as a couple of my N.O. buddies put it) and both Nagin and Blanco were worthless. Bush takes the blame, but it’s fairly misplaced.
Bush gets more than perhaps what you think he deserves because the Federal problems were so blatant and lied about (“no-one could anticipate the breech of the levies”…) by the Administration; and because at its root the problem lay with the Army Corps of Engineers levees, which were never designed to withstand the storms they knew would eventually hit the city. The ACE has known about the levee problem forever, but between ACE management issues, corrupt construction funding, and Federal budgetary decisions, the levees were never fixed or upgraded.
As an aside, I believe Louisiana has several special places in the dictionary under “corruption”, “political characters”, and “styles of government”.
Both Longs are interesting in a political science stand point when it comes to how they gained, kept, and used their power.
Even in his death Huey was powerful. Up until recently the divide in Louisiana politics wasn’t as much “Republican” and “Democrat” as it was “Pro-Long” and “Anti-Long”
…but at a drive through window!
I stopped at a small truck stop in LA on my way to FL. Looking around at the customers my immediate reaction was, “Are doing a remake of Deliverance around here?”
One does not need a PhD to understand what I saw. I make a point out of hanging out with folks that are different and of, um, lesser advantage in life. But those folks were borderline scary.
at a walk-up place in the French Quarter. It was self-serve, like getting a Slurpee at 7-11. Then off down the street we went, carefree since there are no open container laws there…
There was the NH senate race in 2002, concerning phone jamming. 4 people were convicted in that case including a state GOP official and the RNC’s northeast regional director (he was also the NRSC’s northeast regional director).
the conservative meme that illegal aliens are voting in American elections, presumably for Democrats. (I challenged Another Skeptic, who has repeated it here, to give any documented allegations that it’s happened and he wouldn’t do it.)
That’s the last thing they’d do. Go somewhere on purpose where government officials check their ID’s? No.
However, the elections in 2000 and 2004 were not stolen. Repeat to yourselves…
2000? Well, that’s all so much water under the bridge now. I stopped kvetching after 2004 election, personally, because irregularities in Ohio or no, Bush had enough of the national popular vote to make it clear who the majority favored. Although it would have been poetic justice had Kerry carried Ohio but Bush still won the popular vote.
The only perceived failures of exit polling in the US are…..you got it, Florida and Ohio, 2000 and 2004 respectively.
When the exit polls in Ukraine showed that the wrong person “won”, the US supported a whole new election. And then the exit polled winner won. However, in this country, we just throw up our hands and say, “Gee, the polls were in error.”
In Germany, winners are announced not too many hours after the polls close by using exit polls. The ballots, meanwhile, are counted manually for a few days. According to Thom Hartmann there has never been an error.
If that, in brief, isn’t evidence for stolen elections I don’t know what is.
Because it’s an anonymous exit poll, it can’t have any credence. To me, it’s much more likely that someone would attempt to skew large eastern States’ exit polls in order to influence finicky voters in other parts of the country who might accidentally hear ‘leaked’ poll results.
Here are some excerpts from a good article that doubts the overall accuracy of US exit polls and some of the reasons why they are apples and oranges when looking at German poll results, trumpeted as being very accurate:
On US Polls
NEP Exit polls
* State exit polls sampled 15 to 55 precincts per state, which translated in 600 to 2,800 respondents per state. The national survey sampled 11,719 respondents at 250 precincts (see the NEP methodology statements here and here)
* NEP typically sends one interviewer to each polling place. They hire interviewers for one day and train them on a telephone conference call.
* The interviewers must leave the polling place uncovered three times on Election Day to tabulate and call in their results. They also suspend interviewing altogether after their last report, with one hour of voting remaining.
* The response rate for the 2000 exit polls was 51%, after falling gradually from 60% in 1992. NEP has not yet reported a response rate for 2004.
* Interviewers often face difficulty standing at or near the exit to polling places. Officials at many polling places require that the interviewers stand at least 100 feet from the polling place along with “electioneering” partisans.
On German Polls:
German Exit Polls (by FG Wahlen)
Dr. Freeman’s paper includes exit poll data conducted by the FG Wahlen organization for the ZDF television network. I was able to contact Dr. Dieter Roth of FG Wahlen by email, and he provided the following information:
* They use bigger sample sizes: For states, they sample 80 to 120 polling places and interview 5000 and 8000 respondents. Their national survey uses up to 22,000 interviews.
* The use two “well trained” interviewers per polling place, and cover voting all day (8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.) with no interruptions.
* Interviewers always stand at the exit door of the polling place. FG Wahlen contacts polling place officials before the election so that the officials know interviewers will be coming. If polling place officials will not allow the interviewers to stand at the exit door, FG Wahlen drops that polling place from the sample and replaces it with another sample point.
* Their response rates are typically 80%; it was 83.5% for the 2002 federal election.
* The equivalent of the German of the US Census Bureau conducts its own survey of voters conducted within randomly selected polling places. This survey, known as “ReprГ¤sentativ-Statistik,” provides high quality demographic data on the voting population that FG Wahlen uses to weight their exit polls.
Dr. Roth also added the following comment: “I know that Warren Mitofsky’s job is much harder than ours, because of the electoral system and the more complicated structure in the states.”
The United States doesn’t spend enough money on exit polling to make it reliable enough to use as a gauge of election integrity. (Surprise, surprise – doing it “on the cheap” once again…)
However, FL in 2000 should have gone for Gore by any number of measures (just ask Pat Buchanan…), and the exit polling irregularities in 2004 Ohio were backed up by extensive documentation of voting irregularities. That means the exit polls were probably on to something, though for the reasons you note above I wouldn’t trust them enough to re-run the election.
I’ve learned something. So, it isn’t the system, per se, but the details.
You’re a class act.
Since this was a good learning experience, you should just trust me on foreign policy.
🙂
I think this is a key part most people don’t understand when it comes to software.
Cell Phones – You accept the fact that lines drop, connections are bad, calls sometimes fail – but what you get for the price is worth it. A lot of software falls in that category, it’s imperfect but it’s not worth the cost of making it perfect.
Now look at medical equipment, airplanes, voting. In those places failure is a very expensive issue and the effort needs to be made to make the software perfect.
Well, for medical equipment and flight software, extraordinary effort is put in to insure 99.9999% perfection. And it achieves that goal.
But for voting software, it’s the people who weren’t good enough for the cell phone software writing it. No one dies (not directly anyways) when they screw it up so you have buggy imperfect software in use for voting machines.
And by and large running on an operating system (Windows or Linux) that would never be allowed in any piece of medical equipment, airplane, nuclear reactor, etc.
Until the governmental entities buying this stuff understand how to specify the error rates and uptime statistics correctly, I doubt the voting machine software will improve.
Maybe this decertification is a step in the right direction. But the companies who make this stuff need to face penalties for a screwup that are similar to penalties faced by companies whose software might kill people if not written correctly.
One of the reasons the vendors are having problems with Colorado is that our rules are the most stringent in the country. One can argue that this is good and bad.
If we then added fines for vendors who don’t meet our standards, I’m not sure we would have any vendors left who would want to do business here.
…that Georgia-Pacific has paper…
Both counties use ESS machines, Mesa has more in the pipeline, and they have all been decertified.
I can’t even begin to imagine what the game plan is in these counties that have gone electronic for some time now and probably discarded their pre-electronic voting systems.
Any solution won’t be cheap.