Today the Superior Court certified all returns in Delaware… Of course that includes the contested Paradee/Thornburg race in the twenty-ninth district…
As we saw in 2000 at some point finality has to set in… A decision has to be made so things can move on…. The decision has to be made on the facts that are present at that time, and a moral decision has to be made whether those facts presented have credibility…
The Superior Court, led by James T Vaughn, today provided that finality… Thornburg is in.
But the issue of having Paradee “Gored” by a Diebold machine, does not need to disappear into history. Lessons can be learned to insure that it does not happen in the future…
Remember the Diebold scare of Ohio and again in Clinton’s surprise in New Hampshire?… In Delaware all machines scanning our absentee vote are Diebold… and as we see, are easily exploitable…. The voter fills out an absentee ballot on a punch card, circling little dots as one does on the SAT… Those are then fed into a scanner which spits out the total….
Now with the infusion of a large number of anticipated persons who would vote early, additional ballots were ordered from the vendor… It is those ballots which caused the error… Out of the entire state, only those of three districts were affected… the 28th, 29th, and 33rd. The tiny lines alongside of those extra ballots… a bar-code… had lines in the wrong places… thereby programming the scanner to search for votes in the wrong places on those ballots… The ballots looked perfectly normal to the voter… They looked perfectly normal to human election officials…But to the Diebold scanner programmed to read them in just a certain way….. the votes on the ballot did not match the selections of where they were to be recorded…
Republican State Chairman Tom Ross got it wrong on WDEL Votes from Obama were not given to Paradee..
The scanner looked for votes exactly where it was programmed to investigate, and recorded those totals that it saw, as the total of votes cast…
Delaware State law mandated a recount because of the closeness of the race… As the recount progressed, the combined total of new votes for just that race, was twenty five additional votes… As human beings logged the correct totals, the adjustment in the vote that we are now given…. was the result…. (which incidentally is 12 higher than any other absentee total of any other race).
Who are these human beings?.. Get this… an assortment of bankers and lawyers…. bankers because they can add totals together, and lawyers because they can decipher what a voter meant… This anachronism from our colonial past, is still in effect today… Therefore all we have is the faith that an assortment of bankers and lawyers told the truth and were not inclined to put one or the other candidates into that position… and we all know how far we can trust bankers and lawyers… both pillars of morality of our social fabric….
The original idea that a group who was independent of the Department of Elections, would do the recount was to insure the integrity of the Election process… In other words Election volunteers could not skew a race’s results and then cover up their own error during the recount.. Probably a good thing… And having banker and lawyers would be not issue, if the results were easily checked and verified by independent trustworthy sources…the colonial town pastor for example….(lol)
Who were the bankers in question? My sources don’t know, but I certainly hope that it was no one from Wilmington Trust (Thornburg $200), Bank of America (Thornburg$150), or DELBANKPAC (Thornburg $250), or lawyers representing clients Chesapeake Utilities(Thornburg $300), Civic Affairs Construction Council (Thornburg $450), Blue Water development(Thornburg $200), Delaware Hotel Association (Thornburg $300), Sunoco (Thornburg $300), Verizon (Thornburg $300), Comcast (Thornburg $300), First State Manufactured Housing (Thornburg $200), or Astra Zenica (Thornburg $200): certainly we can hope that none of these interests were on that select group that secretly recounted the ballots…”Pick a number, just so Thornburg wins….(laughter around the room…)..”
So there are apparently fuzzy issues with our voting process, and whether or not Paradee had his election stolen away from him by actual votes, or by sloppy accounting by some drunk lawyer or banker….. we may never know…
The votes are kept on file for 22 months and if not needed for any pending a lawsuit… are then destroyed forever… Sot there is still time, but it will take a court order to investigate….
Even then it will be too late for “Trey” Paradee….
For as of today, all the results have been certified….
ADDENDUM: The Department of Elections was still unaware that the Comptroller’s race of the t29th District had very few absentee votes registered similar to the Presidential race…( see the several posts below this one)….However that race was so lopsided, those missing votes would have no impact.
Perhaps next month you might be able to read this story in the News Journal. lol
10 comments
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November 11, 2008 at 7:56 am
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November 11, 2008 at 8:10 am
Al Mascitti
Please get in touch if you’re interested in talking about this on the radio.
November 11, 2008 at 5:53 pm
jason330
Manlove is going to be on Jensen today. It would be good radio if someone was not so committeed to being the most mysterious blogger in Delaware.
November 11, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Mike Matthews
Al,
I asked for an email yesterday from the elusive Kavips. He’s mine first!!! In fact, I wonder if there even is a Kavips. Could it be that Kavips is just a front? Perhaps he’s some automaton doing the work of John Daniello or some other thug who doesn’t know how to use a computer?
November 12, 2008 at 1:29 am
kavips
LOL… perhaps….
November 12, 2008 at 1:30 am
kavips
And Mike I will be getting back to you… There are some things that need to be done first……
November 12, 2008 at 1:41 am
kavips
Yeah, I heard Ms. Manlove… Rick sort of botched the interview by not reading kavips and having the facts at his finger tips… the first twenty minutes turned out to be just a recap of the facts…
By the way, Delaware has a good person as Commissioner of Elections… WE, The People, are lucky.
However there were some questions I wished had been asked….
The board of canvas is picked by who, and who is present at the time the canvassing is done… In other words, is there any citizen oversight that occurs when an election is overturned, especially when that choice will set the future of Delaware back by decades….?
Is Ms Manlove any relation to the Delawarean Manlove who first ratified the U. S. Constitution at the Golden Fleece Tavern on December 7, 1787?
November 12, 2008 at 7:11 am
kavips
And Al, I would, but you are just on at a time that’s w-a-y too early.
November 17, 2008 at 6:26 pm
David Anderson
You have it backwards. It was Thornburg who almost had the election taken from her. Of course the absentee ballots would be higher in this race, they weren’t read and the totals weren’t changed for the other races (though they should have been). Talk about backwards thinking.
November 17, 2008 at 11:01 pm
kavips
Sorry, your argument fails to explain why more people would cast their vote for Thornburg, than voted for Governor, Senator, Lt. Governor, Insurance Commissioner, Clerk of Kent County, Register of Wills….
The logical explanation which you omitted, is that the votes for Thornburg were made up at the board of canvass. One must be especially suspicious because most of her overwhelming lead, was in Paradee’s favorite district where he, not her, dominated the machine vote.
It appears the votes were made up.