Those voting machine cartridges in Lake County....

lambert's picture

Sure, shit happens. But when some shit happens I like to have a little more information, and maybe a post mortem. Early this morning I commented:

It doesn't look good when you've got the mayor of Hammond calling out the mayor of Gary, an Obama supporter, on national TV, about why the count gets stuck at 0% for hours, and the mayor of Gary can’t explain it. I’m not charging fraud, but I am saying that it looks bad, and that people should ask questions. The mayor of Gary should be prepared to answer them. He should also be prepared to explain why it is necessary to consolidate all the voting machine cartridges at the airport (!), and what measures are taken to secure them. All these questions should be easy to answer.

Now, I am well aware that the OFB discredited themselves and their candidate after NH and NV by propagating baseless charges against Hillary, all of which came to nothing. However, it is also true that in NH, the consolidation of the voting machine cartridges in a single location — which is a single point of failure for an attack — does not happen. So, where there was never any structural basis for questioning NH, except for numbers people thought were funny but were noisy, here, there is, combined with a process that, to a mind not entirely naive, suggests holding back results.

Of course, these questions almost never get asked, and there wasn't much coverage of the slow count in Gary, this morning. But the Chicago Tribune had one interesting data point:

The tallying of machine votes from the county's 561 precincts also was slowed by a missing cartridge in a Hammond precinct and two from Gary precincts, election officials said.

So, did the cartridges go missing on the way to the airport, or on the way from the airport? And what were the arrangements for their security? Were there any at all?

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Iphie's picture

Well,

I didn't save the commentary between the two mayors last night, but iirc, the mayor of Hammond said that all of the votes in his city were counted, processed and sent to the county by 7:30 -- he said at that point, he knew the margins in his city, and after having spoken with some of the other mayors in the district, he knew the margins in their cities as well. If that is true, reporting from Hammond may have been delayed for a short time, but certainly not well past midnight, when we started to get returns. His question was why did Gary take so long -- a question that has still not been answered.

Another question that I asked last night was why on earth was the mayor of Gary discussing voting reporting and procedures for the entire county? I can understand why he would have specific knowledge of his own city, but I can imagine no legitimate reason why he would be qualified to issue statements on behalf of the entire county -- it seems to me that there would be an election commissioner or a spokesperson from the election board who would legitimately be an authority for the entire county. If he was speaking with true knowledge of the situation, why was he given access to the results and ballots of these other precincts?

Again, about the delay -- the mayor of Gary said it was because of the size of Gary and all of the early voting. As someone on CNN pointed out, Indianapolis is a much larger city and they had no problems whatsoever, and as the mayor of Hammond pointed out, all of the early voting was done on the same machines as same day voting, and the results are almost immediate. So what was the hold-up? And why was the mayor of Gary suggesting earlier in the night that the results from Gary were going to surprise a lot of people?

bringiton's picture

The mayor of Gary is a loud-mouth, pompous ass and a fool?

Just a thought.

LostClown's picture

I really

don't trust him. Or maybe it's the bad association I have with Gary, IN since I grew up in Chicago. Nah, I think it's his sliminess.

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