September 27, 2006 Hamblen County Election (III)

The previous posts (I) and (II) reported the chancellor's ruling in the Election Contest filed by Edwin Osborne and Bobby Reinhardt.

I attended the September 22 trial. It was an excellent pressentation of evidence and testimony about what happened on Aug. 3 during vote-counting.

County Commissioner Nancy Phillips was there in the morning, and County Mayor David Purkey was there at different times during the day.

Since I did not run for re-election, I was not at the Courthouse after the polls closed on Aug. 3.

At the trial, the atmosphere was referred to as a "zoo." Several people who were there agreed with that assessment. A witness testifying on behalf of the Election Commission stated that it was "controlled chaos."

If you are regular blog reader, you know that numbers are important to me---see the July 8, 2005, post where I spotted and got corrected the $1 million dollar mistake by the state in setting the county's certified tax rate in 2005.

Numbers were important in the Election Contest trials. Numbers, documents, and vote tallies that came out of the Election Commission Office on August 3 were put into evidence.

Two documents were unusual. One said that 95% of the precincts had reported and that total of 10,945 votes had been cast. Another document said that 100% of the precincts had reported and 10,620 votes had been cast. There is a problem here---a computer glitch, human error, or some other problem.

Exhibit 7 (which was retrieved for Commissioner Osborne from a recycling box by Election Administrator Wanda Neal) showed that 731 votes were cast in District 1 and 375 were cast in District 4.

Exhibit 5, however, showed that 466 votes were cast in District 1, and 319 were cast in District 4.

How do you go from a report of 731 votes cast to a report of only 466 votes cast? How do you go from 375 votes cast to only 319 votes cast?

The explanation, hopefully, will come from the Special Master who will conduct the recount, check the machines, and check the paper ballots.

Perhaps the contradictory documents and totals that were put out at various times may be explained by human error, plain old mistakes, transposition of numbers, stress and rushing.

Whatever the explanation of the differing information on the reports that were provided that night, events such as this should be resolved.

A recount and an examination of the machines should answer many of the questions about the "controlled chaos" of August 3.

With electronic data and computerization, there needs to be some understanding and an explanation of how one set of numbers came out of the machines at one point in time and another smaller set of numbers came out later.

It seems plausible to have smaller vote totals during the early steps of the counting process and then larger vote totals later on as all votes are counted.

It is difficult, however, to understand how you can have larger vote totals in the early part of the counting process and then smaller vote totals in the end.