Burnt Orange Report

Beverly Kaufman hung up on me - she's not a very pleasant person.

Not a very honest one, either. Kaufman has had repreated problems with irregular vote counts and other procedures through the years. Thius year, she seems determined to prove herself the Katherine Harris of Houston.

Kaufman and her staff counted some 40,000 mail-in ballot countywide on El;ection Day, then inexplicably packed up and left at 9:30 p.m. -- leaving untold numbers of ballots uncounted, in direct violation of Texas Election Code 65.0002, which requires a continuous count until all ballots have been tallied.

Now, Kaufman says she and her staff have been too busy to count those remaining ballots in the four days since. Busy doing what? Perhaps purging the voter rolls?

On October 4, the deadline for newly registered voters, there were more than 1,890,000 registered voters in Harris County, according to county officials. On Election Day, that number was less than 1,083,000, also according to county officials.

With hundreds of provisional ballots left to count, how many will be thrown out because the voters had already been purged from the rolls -- legitmately or otherwise?

This is shaping up to be an unprecedented case of voter fraud.

I hope you don't mind, but I sent this to Daily Kos and TalkLeft -- anything that takes Delay down is worth doing. And I am proud to call Mr. Vo and American and a Texan.

"Get a rope. You've convicted this person without a trial. Get a rope! Lets hang her. There's NO other explanation, its voter fraud. Get a rope!"

That's the first common-sensical thing you've ever said, Peter.

I appoint you Burnt Orange commissar of ropes.

Now, to find a tree..

Florida was beyond our control in 2000. But now the fight has come to our front doorstep, and every Texan passionate about democracy should stand up not for Vo, not for Teflin, but for a voting system that counts everybody's votes and gives all eligible voters an equal chance for their voices to count. Your vote is your voice, don't let anyone in Harris County or anywhere silence our voices as Texans who care about fair democracy.

They have already invaded and we did not see it. Remember our TX dream team and how they lost badly. There is a reason for it. As I was doing some investigating research for BlackBoxVoting, I do some interesting documents posted on the web. According the Observer's Report for the Nov 5 general election, strange things happen that night, the database for the election computer system "caused the Associated Press to not receive new vote totals for about an hour--from 9:30 to 10:20 p.m.--which was the most critical time for its television station customers. During that time the AP received no fresh vote totals from the Secretary of State via transmissions, but the AP inquiry terminals continued to work. In another problem, news media reporters who were getting vote totals from the Secretary of State’s Web site complained of slow or no access during Tuesday
evening. Jim Edwards of the IT staff has been able to find very heavy outside traffic of almost 500,000 inquiries between 7 p.m. and midnight on election day. This would cause the Web servers to be overloaded and slow in response to heavy Internet traffic." It further states the largest counties, mainly Bexar and Tarrant, were very slow to respond.

It looks like a classic Denial of Service attack that night. I may be wrong, but why the overload? Why the hault of information for one hour? As I looked at the election results, it just happened to be some strange numbers on voter turnout. When you compare turnout rates to pervious years, the numbers were very low that night, more like 30% despite the amount of money the Dream Team spent on campaigning.

Any Info on This afternoon's recount?
can't find anything on Vo or Heflin's website or Off the Kuff or AP?

recount started at 1:00PM in Harris County

Re:

At least one poll worker was denied an opportunity to serve as an election judge after being grilled on his partisan identification.
=================

What precinct did that occur in?

Peter-

Why don't you want to talk about "I'm losing to this idot!" in the context of this race?

Is it because your 22 year incumbant, Chair of the most powerful committee in the Texas House, who out spent his opponent 3 to 1 still got beat?

Since they named an elementary school after him for all his great work on education (which he continues by cutting teacher's health insurance and medical coverage for kids), why don't they name the political play of spending too much, getting too little votes, and trying to steal the election after him?

How 'bout this example:

Person 1: How did your friend, Candidate X do in his race?

Person 2: Terrific, he won. But the other candidate is pulling a Heflin.

Person 1: Damn, what ever happend to candidates that work harder and get more votes taking office?

Person 2: I guess they get Heflined.

Why don't you tie that sign up with a rope?

I don't suppose anyone can explain why the vote totals held up for Vo after all ballots were counted? I thought for sure Heflin's victory would have been secured.