Republican Mark Obenshain clings to a razor-thin 777 vote lead in the Virginia Attorney General’s race, but a discovery that nearly 3000 absentee votes were not tallied by Diebold/Premier machines has thrust the race into confusion. Democratic Congressman Gerald Connolly’s political team first noticed a glaring discrepancy in the turn-in rates for absentee ballots from the county’s three different congressional districts. In Connolly’s 10th district,?88 percent of the absentee ballots requested for Fairfax County were returned. In the 11th district, 86 percent of requested absentee ballots were returned. However, in the 8th district, according to the results, fewer than half the requested absentee ballots were returned. The 8th District portion of Fairfax County is the most heavily Democratic part of the county.
Fairfax County voter registrar Cameron Quinn reportedly e-mailed Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman a statement reporting that 7,127 absentee votes from the 8th district came back. Only 4,168 of those votes were officially counted, meaning that around 3000 votes disappeared during the tally. Quinn went on to add:
I suspect there are machine totals that either didn’t print tapes, or didn’t show full tallies on the tapes.
The Diebold (or Premier Elections Solutions as it is now called) machines have a history of glitches that “lose” votes. In 2008, the Humboldt Election transparency project in California found a “software glitch” that erased 197 votes in a single precinct. In that instance, Carolyn Crnich, the County Registrar:
said she discovered a deck of 197 vote-by-mail ballots for the precinct that had been run through the ballot counting optical scanner, but did not seem to appear in the final vote tallies.
After exchanging several calls with Premier Elections Solutions, Crnich said she was told that the software begins counting decks of ballots at zero, and that sometimes when a deck is deleted from the machine due to normal complications, the software also deletes the Deck Zero, which in this case was the vote-by-mail ballots from Precinct 1E-45.
The integrity of a democracy requires that every valid vote be counted. Diebold/Premier machines do not meet the safeguards needed to be entrusted with preserving votes. Computer glitches that disenfranchise thousands of voters are unacceptable. Fairfax County has an obligation to hand count the votes and to get the total right. A valid count of all the votes would probably push Democrat Mark Herring in the lead, given that the portion of Fairfax County that lies within the 8th congressional district is overwhelmingly Democratic. However, the reason these votes must be counted is not so that Democrat Mark Herring can win the Attorney General’s race, but rather because failing to count those votes undermines the very integrity of our democracy. All the votes must be hand counted so that the will of the voters in the Commonwealth of Virginia prevails.
Edited/Published by:SB
