MB Civic

Editor’s Note: The brief blog report below lacks confirmation, so it cannot be taken as a final assessment of the vote counting procedures in California’s 50th Congressional District. However, it does harken back to the controversy over uncounted votes in the 2004 San Diego Mayoral election in which more than five thousand write-in ballots for Democratic candidate Donna Frye were ruled invalid – handing the election to incumbent Republican Dick Murphy. Murphy was forced to retire less than a year later amid a corruption scandal. – ma/TO

For Background See:
Frye in Position to Score a Victory Whether She Fights On or Bows Out    •

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Busby/Bilbray Election In Doubt
By Brad Friedman
BradBlog.com

Saturday 10 June 2006

Uncounted ballots reported by Registrar is decreased by 2000, but number of votes in Busby/Bilbray race increases by 8000!

I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for this. There always is.

As ever, it underscores the need for verifiable elections, and begins to remind us that the folks who give a damn about this down there in San Diego County better damned well be keeping an eye on the chain of custody for those paper ballots and “paper trails” as they are being theoretically “counted” by the SD County Registrar of Voters.

According to this web page from the SD County’s Registrar of Voters office, as of 5pm last night, the number of uncounted absentee and provisional ballots in the entire county of SD has decreased by 2,000 from the reported 68,500 that were announced as “still to be counted” on election night.

The number of votes in the now-questionable Busby/Bilbray US House (CA-50) special election, however, has been increased by 8,000 votes.

Since the number of votes in the CA-50 race is a smaller subset of the total votes within SD County, one would think that if 2,000 absentee or provisionals were counted for the entire county, the number of votes in CA-50 might go up by a fraction of that number. Instead, they’ve gone up by 8,000, according to the county’s website!

So far, I’ve been unable to get any comments from “quotable sources” at the Registrar’s office on the reported updates. Very few in the office, apparently, are allowed to speak on record to the press for some reason.

As mentioned, no doubt there’s a perfectly good explanation for all of this. Right? It’s just that you and I may never know it. And, if we do, the election officials will likely never have to prove that their explanation – or the veracity of their reported vote counts – is valid. To anybody.