Nearly 3,000 Votes Disappeared From Florida’s Recount | Hacker News Reader

Nearly 3,000 Votes Disappeared From Florida’s Recount

nytimes.com

27 pointssmacktoward5 comments

If somebody believes that Broward county made up 80,000 votes to rig the election what evidence can you show that they didn't?

As far as I can tell there's no evidence in Florida to differentiate fraud from incompetence.

And if there's no way to tell the difference aren't they the same thing? Whether you believe it's fraud or incompetence is just what you choose to believe, but that belief is not based on anything real.

Elections shouldn't rely on trust they should rely on verification. Observers observing and reporting, and video documentation. There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to type in any poll location into youtube and get a video covering the whole day from polls opening through counting. That a person voted is not a secret, only their choices are.

"The difference in Broward County was 0.29 percent — higher than the margin between the candidates in both the Senate and agriculture commissioner’s races."

Apparently, they have rules about how quickly the results have to be determined. Due to technical difficulties, if I read it correctly, roughly 3000 ballots got tossed out because of these time constraints, including in very close races. It also said that this situation more or less prevents hand recounts from being possible due to the same time constraints?

It doesn't make sense to me to have rules like that when you're trying to run a legitimate election, so please correct me if I misread it.

edit - wording

The reason that they have time limits is to prevent what just happened. After the time limit was over, candidate A had more votes. The people in charge of the polling stations were supporters of B (is this information important?). After the time limit they "found" more uncounted votes. However since the time limit was up, something illegal happened. Should we let the organizers "find" more votes (possibly illegally, possibly due to incompetence). Should we invalidate legal votes because the people in charge of the polls are incompetent?

The current solution is to have an elected official appoint the overseers of the polls. If the overseers do something that could make election fraud easier (like "finding" votes after counting some of them), then the people in charge are fired.

The fact that "finding more votes" is even technically possible highlights a problem.

Occams Razor applies heavily to Southeastern Florida politics.

I would bet what little money I have that incompetence is the issue with Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Since I've been in Florida (1980) I've seen and heard of city and county commission seats, county sheriff, city manager and the like getting traded like baseball cards in the '60s.

Look at the names of past city commissioners for cities in PBC and County office like Clerk of Courts and Supervisor of Elections and search from there.

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