What are you sitting around reading blogs for if you haven't voted yet? Go tell the electronic voting machines what you think, then let's hope it matters.
No posting for me for much of the day, so let me pose the question to readers about Texas that Doc Berman posed about Congress: What will today's elections mean for issues related to Texas sentencing and criminal justice reform? How do you think the different gubernatorial candidates would differ on criminal justice? Tell me your election day thoughts in the comments.
UPDATE: Commenters mentioned the chance of Democrats retaking several Dallas judicial seats that were long considered firm GOP bastions. I'm also reminded of the jail bond votes in Howard and Bandera counties. What other local judicial races, in particular, do Grits readers think we should be watching today in Texas?
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12 comments:
With luck maybe we'll get some better judges up here in Dallas County, anyway. Cross your fingers!
Here's for hoping for better judges in Dallas...
I don't have much hope for the gubernatorial candidates. We know what we'll get with Perry, and it ain't good. Strayhorn (or whatever she goes by now) scares the daylights out of me. Bell is an unknown commodity. He sounded good in the debate I saw, but who knows how that would translate to the governorship. And Kinky? I don't know; some days I think he's the only answer, others I think he'd be a disaster.
We'll just have to see.
I tried voting, twice, and was defeated both times by people at the polls specifically to cheat the system.
I will never trust anything that can be compromised so easily, and with such impunity.
When I voted a couple of weeks ago in Houston I noticed a trend on the ballot so I counted and took notes:
State appelate court there were five races. FOUR had republicans running unopposed.
District judges 22 unopposed republicans out of 29 district elections.
Family court judges: 7 unopposed republicans (including one who's daughter was arraigned for intoxicated manslaughter after killing her boyfriend while driving drunk at six times the legal limit not to mention being 19 so she couldn't drink at all legally) out of 8 races.
County judge: 1 unopposed republican in 1 race.
County court at law judges: four races, four unopposed republicans.
County criminal court judges: 11 unopposed republicans out of 15 races.
County probate judges: 4 unopposed republicans out of four races.
So that means that 53 local officials (JUDGES for the love of God) will take office without even having to get more than 1 vote (BTW I declined to vote in ANY of these races). What the hell? Where are the democrats? The libertarians? The independents for fuck's sake?
Let's just say I'm not thinking positive when it comes to getting Harris County off the "sends most people to death row" list.
I'm in Florida and watched your gov debate on C-span. It looked to me like Bell was your best choice. I am going by only that debate when I say this. Kinky looked like he had made too many bad comments, too many bad jokes. The elderly lady was like she was on a high from drugs. She made me nervous just watching her. Perry seemed to know that he hadn't much of a chance of being beat. Bell did appear smarter than the others and maybe more normal. After the debate was over, I told my husband that I felt sorry for you guys in Texas. I know a lot of people aren't happy with Perry, but those others on the list didn't seem to have much to offer either.
So there you go, a total outsiders point of view. :)
The old lady looked high and made you nervous...that's classic. She must be high and, trust me, she makes all of us very nervous!
Thanks for making me laugh on election day.
I think democrats stand a real chance to make some headway in Dallas County. As far as state races having an impact on criminal justice reform, I have my doubts. Republicans will still hold the state legislature and Governor Perry will still have his veto pen.
I voted in Montgomery County (Woodlands/Conroe) and noticed that two or three 9th Court of Appeals Justices (Beaumont) were the sole candidates and only one Democrat was running against an incumbent Republican District Judge (there were several unopposed R incumbents). A few weeks back, the paper said that the Democrat (McCoy) was the first Democrat to run for District Judge in Montgomery County in twelve years. I think there are five District Courts in Montgomery County. Definitely the most Republican place in Texas I've ever lived.
I only had a couple of competitive downballot judicial races where I voted in Austin - both on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. I voted Democrat, mostly because I didn't know the candidates and Sharon Keller is a Republican.
Otherwise, I split my ticket voting for both Rs and Ds - Abbot for AG, Bell for Governor (the least objectionable of the anybody but Perry choices). I also voted for some Libertarians just to protest my lack of choices.
If nobody's going to run in these judges races I wish we didn't have to vote on so many of them. Who even knows who these people are?
UPDATE: The Dallas judges' races look REALLY close - many of them within just a point or two with half the precincts reporting (see here). It looks like it could go either way, depending on what precincts are still out.
Here's an update: Dems swept Dallas county, winning the judges races AND the DA!!
about those machines and the media's polling efforts:
from:
http:// electiondefensealliance.o...n_2006_election
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Major Miscount of Vote in 2006 Election:
Reported Results Skewed Toward Republicans by 4 percent, 3 million votes
Election Defense Alliance Calls for Investigation
BOSTON, MA - November 16, 2006
CONTACT: Jonathan Simon 617.538.6012
Election Defense Alliance, a national election integrity organization, issued an urgent call for further investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic election equipment, after analysis of national exit polling data indicated a major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in U.S. House and Senate races across the country. “These findings raise urgent questions about the electoral machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States,” according to Sally Castleman, National Chair of EDA. This is a national indictment of the vote counting process in the United States!
As in 2004, the exit polling data and the reported election results don’t add up. “But this time there is an objective yardstick in the methodology which establishes the validity of the Exit Poll and challenges the accuracy of the election returns,” said Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance. The Exit Poll findings are detailed in a paper published today on the EDA website.
The 2006 Edison-Mitofsky Exit Poll was commissioned by a consortium of major news organizations. Its conclusions were based on the responses of a very large sample, of more than 10,000 voters nationwide*, and posted at 7:07 p.m. Election Night, on the CNN website. That Exit Poll showed Democratic House candidates had out-polled Republicans by 55.0 percent to 43.5 percent – an 11.5 percent margin – in the total vote for the U.S. House, sometimes referred to as the “generic” vote.
By contrast, the election results showed Democratic House candidates won 52.7 percent of the vote to 45.1 percent for Republican candidates, producing a 7.6 percent margin in the total vote for the U.S. House — 3.9 percent less than the Edison-Mitofsky poll. This discrepancy, far beyond the poll’s +/- 1 percent margin of error, has less than a one in 10,000 likelihood of occurring by chance.
By Wednesday afternoon the Edison-Mitofsky poll had been adjusted, by a process known as “forcing,” to match the reported vote totals for the election. This forcing process is done to supply data for future demographic analysis, the main purpose of the Exit Poll. It involved re-weighting every response so that the sum of those responses matched the reported election results. The final result, posted at 1:00 p.m. November 8, showed the adjusted Democratic vote at 52.6 percent and the Republican vote at 45.0 percent, a 7.6 percent margin exactly mirroring the reported vote totals.
The forcing process in this instance reveals a great deal. The political party affiliation of the respondents in the original 7:07 p.m. election night Exit Poll closely reflected the 2004 Bush-Kerry election margin. After the forcing process, 49-percent of respondents reported voting for Republican George W. Bush in 2004, while only 43-percent reported voting for Democrat John Kerry. This 6-percent gap is more than twice the size of the actual 2004 Bush margin of 2.8 percent, and a clear distortion of the 2006 electorate. There is a significant over-sampling of Republican voters in the adjusted 2006 Exit Poll. It simply does not reflect the actual turnout on Election Day 2006.
EDA’s Simon says, “It required some incredible distortions of the demographic data within the poll to bring about the match with reported vote totals. It not only makes the adjusted Exit Poll inaccurate, it also reveals the corresponding inaccuracy of the reported election returns which it was forced to equal. The Democratic margin of victory in U.S. House races was substantially larger than indicated by the election returns.”
“Many will fall into the trap of using this adjusted poll to justify inaccurate official vote counts, and vice versa,” adds Bruce O’Dell, EDA’s Data Analysis Coordinator, “but that’s just arguing in circles. The adjusted exit poll is a statistical illusion. The weighted but unadjusted 7 pm exit poll, which sampled the correct proportion of Kerry and Bush voters and also indicated a much larger Democratic margin, got it right.” O’Dell and Simon’s paper, detailing their analysis of the exit polls and related data, is now posted on the EDA website.
Election Defense Alliance continues to work with other election integrity groups around the country to analyze the results of specific House and Senate races. That data and any evidence of election fraud, malicious attacks on election systems, or other malfunctions that may shed more light on the discrepancy between exit polls and election results will be reported on EDA’s website.
This controversy comes amid growing public concern about the security and accuracy of electronic voting machines, used to count approximately 80 percent of the votes cast in the 2006 election. The Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, in a September 2006 study, was the latest respected institution to expose significant flaws in the design and software of one of the most popular electronic touch-screen voting machines, the AccuVote-TS, manufactured by Diebold, Inc. The Princeton report described the machine as “vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces.” These particular machines were used to count an estimated 10 percent of votes on Election Day 2006.
A separate “Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan Voting Terminal,” released by the University of Connecticut VoTeR Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering last month, concluded that Diebold’s Accuvote-OS machines, optical scanners which tabulate votes cast on paper ballots, are also vulnerable to “a devastating array of attacks.” Accuvote-OS machines are even more widely used than the AccuVote-TS.
Similar vulnerabilities affect other voting equipment manufacturers, as revealed last summer in a study by the Brennan Center at New York University which noted all of America’s computerized voting systems “have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections.”
The most prudent response to this controversy is a moratorium on the further implementation of computerized voting systems. EDA’s O’Dell cautioned, “It is so abundantly clear that these machines are not secure, there’s no justification for blind confidence in the election system given such dramatic indications of problems with the official vote tally.” And EDA’s Simon summarized, “There has been a rush by some to celebrate 2006 as a fair election, but a Democratic victory does not equate with a fair election. It’s wishful thinking at best to believe that the danger of massive election rigging is somehow past.”
EDA continues to call for a moratorium on the deployment of electronic voting machines in U.S. elections; passage of H.R. 6200, which would require hand-counted paper ballots for presidential elections beginning in 2008; and adoption of the Universal Precinct Sample (UPS) handcount sampling protocol for verification of federal elections as long as electronic election equipment remains in use.
The Exit Poll analysis is a part of Election Defense Alliance’s six-point strategy to defend the accuracy and transparency of the 2006 elections. In addition to extensive analysis of polling data, EDA has been engaged in independent exit polling, election monitoring, legal interventions, and documentation of election irregularities.
*The sample was a national sample of all voters who voted in House races. It was drawn just like the 2004 sample of the presidential popular vote. That is, precincts were chosen to yield a representative (once stratified) sample of all voters wherever they lived/voted--including early and absentee voters and voters in districts where House candidates ran unopposed but were listed on the ballot and therefore could receive votes. As such, the national sample EDA worked with is exactly comparable to the total aggregate vote for the House that we derived from reported vote totals and from close estimates in cases of the few unopposed candidates where 2006 figures were unavailable but prior elections could be used as proxy. It is a very large sampling of the national total, with a correspondingly small (+/-1%) MOE. There were four individual districts sampled for reasons known only to Edison/Mitofsky
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