Murphy Picking Up More Votes For Now
I have just obtained the latest vote numbers in the NY-20 race from Saratoga County, where the campaign of GOP candidate Jim Tedisco claimed on Friday that an unreported discovery of new votes was giving him a pickup of 228, and putting him ahead overall by 30 raw votes. Whether or not that was true at the time, it turns out that as of 10:30 a.m. this morning it's actually the opposite, with Democrat Scott Murphy picking up votes in this county for now.
The numbers provided by a county election commissioner show Murphy picking up a net 97 votes when compared to the state's most recent figures from Friday, as the precincts go through the standard process of proofreading their spreadsheets against the random human errors that occurred on Election Night. These errors tend to be very small and break about evenly, but in a race this close they have suddenly become consequential.
The state could update their numbers for all the counties later this afternoon, so it's worth remembering a piece of wisdom I learned during my six years living in Wisconsin: If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes. For all we know, those Saratoga numbers might have significantly changed yet again, or a different county could have a bunch of newly-revealed votes for either Tedisco or Murphy.
Josh
Matt
Eric
Brian
This confuses me. I can understand discrepancies in counting paper absentee ballots. I can understand disagreements about how to read paper ballots during. But what's up with not being able to accurately report a machine-generated tally on the first try? Can anyone explain to me why discrepancies like this appear in a recanvas?
April 6, 2009 3:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's human error. A precinct will have a certain number of voting machines, and each produces its own total. The poll workers add them up and report that total to the county, and then the county adds them up and reports them to the state. In the haste to get done on election night, people do things like transpose digits as they're entering the numbers. So, 967 gets reported as 697, and you're off by 270, or somebody reads an 8 as a 9 in 1,089 and you're off by 10.
That's why state election boards require counties to double-check, even in elections that aren't close. There always are these kinds of problems.
April 6, 2009 3:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the response. I'm still confused though. Didn't we just spend millions updating voting machines under the Help America Vote Act? If poll workers inevitably introduce errors like that, then how hard can it be to simply network the machines? Hardly seems impossible to remove human error from this aspect of voting with modern technology.
Also, aren't there poll watchers there from each campaign peering over the poll workers' shoulders? How does a transposition error get past three peope?
April 6, 2009 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
The NYB BoE just released new numbers that show Tedisco, overall, up by 97. I haven't parsed through to see where his additional votes came from.
Tedisco's calls to voters to find out their votes, after the fact, ought to be illegal. This is not a news organization with a blind poll - this is a candidate looking to get people to give up the privacy of the voting booth, without first informing them that they are talking to the candidate's campaign. This is offensive. Murphy should ask the court (albeit, the court hand-picked by Tedisco after an earlier favorable ruling) to enjoin these calls.
April 6, 2009 4:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow. I had no idea Eric was a CheeseHead!
April 6, 2009 4:42 PM | Reply | Permalink