Hooray – We Lost
Florida has lost the crown for the most dysfunctional election process in the nation to Arizona, which has totally screwed up.
It turns out that when Arizona declared winners in the recent election there were hundreds of thousands of votes still uncounted.
How did they screw-up? They printed their voters rosters used to identify voters before registration actually closed, so if you registered late in the period your name was in a separate unsorted listing added to the book handed out to precincts, rather than the alphabetical main listing. Late changes of address weren’t printed on the roster. All of these problems, as well as absentee ballots that went astray led a huge number of people required to vote on provisional ballots.
Now throw in the fact that many counties that experienced long lines in 2008 reduced the number of voting locations this year.
Several Congressional seats and the Senator from Arizona are not actually sure things a week after the election, while Florida only has to wait for military absentee ballots, the last item to be counted.
It would be really embarrassing if it turns out that Obama won Arizona.
2 comments
Also embarrassing is if Sheriff Joke actually lost. He’s been trumpeting how his narrow victory margin of victory (80,000 votes) proves he’s hot stuff or something, but with 250,000 provisional votes left to count — most from Hispanics who hate his guts — he might well be forced to leave office short of the grave. Of course, he will mysteriously “die of a heart attack” shortly thereafter (he knows too much and might throw important people under the bus if indicted for misdeeds once the new sheriff audits the office), but so it goes.
It is truly unbelievable that they printed the rosters before the end of the registration period. They had a month to do a merge-purge update and sort and then run the lists off, but they ran the job early and had to print out the change file. It’s just a total and obvious failure of management that people should lose their jobs over it. This is a COBOL 101 ISAM batch process that goes back almost a half-century to the era of punch cards and line printers.
It would definitely be a very good thing if the current Sheriff was ‘retired’ to the old bigots’ home.
Given that the problem was state-wide, there must be a state-wide service bureau involved in the process.