I’ll have more to say one of these days about the various reports about election fraud that are circulating out there, but in the meantime, I couldn’t resist this one.
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That’s simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone … down.
Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.
Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. She was on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.
Now, before anyone goes apoplectic about the Florida results, please note that this breathtakingly-stupid mistake in Broward County, which is largely a Democratic county, had no effect on the vote totals.
Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals, and officials are confident they are accurate.
The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said. All were placed in their own precincts and optical scanners totaled votes, which were then fed to a main computer.
Still, if you’re confident in the integrity of Florida’s voting systems, I have some swamp-land that I’d love to sell you.