Texas voting machines changing some straight-party selections

Tomorrow We Vote
Tomorrow We Vote

ABC reports:

Texas voting machines changing some straight-party selections.

Voters are reporting odd problems on both the Republican and Democratic side of straight-party voting in Texas.

Mickey Blake was one of the voters in those early voting lines in Houston earlier this week.

“I hit straight Democratic ticket,” Blake said.

She says she expected all Democrats to come up on her screen, especially Rep. Beto O’Rourke, but when she got to the last screen to review her choices, she noticed a problem.

“It’s all Democratic except for Ted Cruz was checked,” Blake said.

So she backed up and did it again. And again.

“I tried it a third time and the same thing happened,” she said.

(click here to continue reading Texas voting machines changing some straight-party selections | abc13.com.)

Fired up and ready to vote
Fired up and ready to vote

Anecdotal evidence, sure, but enough people are complaining that the Texas Secretary of State issued a statement.

It’s popped up across Texas often enough for the Secretary of State to put up a statewide advisory on Monday to every Texas election advisor.

The Secretary of State calls it ‘operator error.’

A little disturbing, but perhaps the short term answer is don’t use electronic ballots, if you have a choice, and don’t vote straight ticket even though it is more convenient.

John Kerry Might Have Really Won in 2004

John Kerry at Austin Bergstrom Airport
John Kerry at Austin Bergstrom Airport (taken on November 2, 2012), I almost asked him if he thought he’d become Secretary of State after the 2012 election concluded, but chickened out. I was right though.

John Kerry probably wouldn’t have been the best president, but he would have been much better than Bush. And this means that even Kerry (and especially his wife) admit that GWB didn’t win either election! Neither in 2000, nor in 2004. Jeez…

In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. He was furious, too, at Robert Shrum, his chief strategist, and other campaign advisers who had restrained him from hitting back.

“For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio,” Mike Barnicle, a close friend of Kerry’s and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million-dollar sailboat called Isabel. “We were sitting in the bow,” Barnicle recalled, “and we were talking about a bunch of different things—about Iran, about what the President of Iran was like—and I said, ‘Other than not being President, this is pretty good.’ There was a security boat sailing off to the side of us. Then he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I realize how badly Shrum screwed me.’ ”

(click here to continue reading John Kerry’s Middle East Mission – The New Yorker.)

And as we all know, these voting machines are exactly the same as they were. Probably why Karl Rove was so sure that Mitt Romney was actually going to pull out a victory in Ohio…