I was disenfranchised in the NYS Primary, through no fault of my own. I've been registered since 2000. I've lived the same place my whole life.
My vote was simply not counted. I'm not implying that the machines were tampered with in some way, because I know my poll workers and I asked them
the tally at the end of the night; there were about 315 votes, with Obama slightly ahead.
I had no idea that, somewhere between my local poll workers, and whoever totals up all of the votes, my vote was stolen. I had to read about it in
the New York Times.
Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from
the New York Democratic primary last week,
not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.
...
That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election
districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote[.]
Unoffici
al Tallies in City Understated Obama Vote
I live in the 70th district.
Even worse, I suspected something was up. Like many Americans, after 2000 and 2004, I became very interested in the actual voting process. I was a
poll worker on 9/11, primarily because I wanted to get an insider's view. (I didn't, because the polls were closed before noon that day.) One
thing I was able to glean from my experience was that the majority of poll workers are extremely incompetent. They don't take the classes, and when
they do, they don't pay attention, or take them seriously. They're uninformed, so much so that when I asked why Mike Gravel was still on the
ticket, they didn't even know he was running. While that may serve to curb electioneering, their ignorance makes the process much more complicated
than it should be, and leaves the entire system vulnerable to fraud. When people don't know the rules, they don't understand why they're important
and need to be followed.
For example, my boyfriend was unable to vote in Brooklyn... where he was born, has resided all his life, has voted in every primary and election since
2003. The poll worker told him that he wasn't registered. She didn't give him an absentee ballot, or an affidavit (to cast a vote which would then
be contingent on his registration issue being worked out)-- she gave him a Voter's Registration form, and I know, because I kept it. He left,
because he had to go to work. His mom went to vote at the same poll later that day, and the same poll worker, when pressed, claimed that she had
given him an absentee ballot. She's a liar. She may not have known any better, but the end result is that Obama lost a vote.
Now, look what the NYT has to say about Brooklyn. FYI: my bf lives in the 55th Assembly District.
The 53rd Assembly District, in Brooklyn, is represented by the borough’s Democratic chairman, Assemblyman Vito P. Lopez, another Clinton supporter.
He said the party faithful have produced lopsided margins of as much as 160 to 4 and that on Primary Day he fielded election captains in every
district to galvanize Hispanic voters for Mrs. Clinton.
“We ran it the old-fashioned way,” he said. Still, he said, the 118 to 0 vote “has to be a mistake.”
At the Archive, a cafe and video store on the border of Bushwick and East Williamsburg, the manager, Brad Lee, agreed. “There were Obama posters in
everyone’s windows,” he said. “There was even Obama graffiti."
...
On Feb. 5,
Mrs. Clinton carried 61 of the state’s 62 counties but won Brooklyn by a margin of less than 2 percent... delegates are awarded
proportionately on the basis of the primary vote in each Congressional district...
Unoffici
al Tallies in City Understated Obama Vote
The Board of Elections, apparently, has no more information than I just gave you.
The Board of Elections has acknowledged that errors in reporting the election day tallies made it appear that Obama had received not a single vote in
55 election districts, when in reality his votes had simply not been counted, said Valerie Vazquez-Rivera, a spokeswoman for the board. In another 27
districts, Obama actually received no votes, she said.
New York City Still Counting Votes
Our esteemed Mayor Bloomberg agrees with me, in that it was, indeed, incompetence on the part of the Board of Elections, via their workers. He goes
on to imply that their incompetence may have some nefarious roots.
"
What they do is they hire on the basis of politics, and obviously the people that they have aren't as competent as you would like, because
the results that they reported just defies credibility," said Bloomberg. "The probability of Obama in some of those districts getting zero votes is
zero. Let's get serious here."
Could the poll workers be feigning incompentence as a cover for politically- motivated fraud? One could test the theory: let's say it was plain, old
stupidity that caused grown people to all of a sudden forget how to count, or how to write numbers in boxes. If that were true, the same mistake
would have been made across the board, right? Hillary Clinton should have lost a district or two, right?
Hmmm.
So... that's fraud, right? That, plus the fact that in all these places where Obama supposedly didn't receive a single vote, Hillary supporters run
the local party apparatus, leads me to believe that it is.
I don't know if primary results are normally certified so long after the election, so I can't say if they're trying to cover their butts in that
respect, but I wonder who has oversight of the internal probe.
There's a larger point to all of this, of course: delegates. Have the delegates been awarded already? CNN thinks so, since they have NY's results
posted: Clinton- 179, Obama- 94. I wonder if they'll be re-allocated.
I'll be at Congressman Rangel's office today, on an unrelated matter. I'll ask, but the fact that I even have to be involved in this is really
ridiculous. Don't people get paid, with my tax dollars, whose job it is to make sure poll workers are trained properly and know how to count the
votes? And why are the poll workers political hacks? What is going on?
Is no one guarding our democracy?
