Now that we’ve had conservatives dismissing exit polling because it inaccurately portrayed the final results and claiming no credible evidence has emerged that computer problems may have impacted the presidential election, we have evidence to the contrary. OK, not exactly impacting the presidential election, but an optical scanning voting devise, not unlike those used in Florida that gave birth to some conspiracy theories, made a colossal mistake.
A hand recount declared a new winner.The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana’s Franklin County.
The recount Thursday pushed Democrat Carroll Lanning from fifth to third in the three-seat commissioners race, while Republican Roy Hall fell to fifth.
Democrats had suspected a glitch after preliminary election results included a Libertarian congressional candidate winning 7.7 percent of the vote in Franklin County, more than four times better than he did across the entire district.
Fidlar workers said no programming problems were found in the Accuvote 2000 ES system, but said the Rock Island, Ill.-based company is going over its programming elsewhere in the state and in Wisconsin and Michigan, which, like Indiana, have straight-party voting.
And Kevin Drum has a post outlining the concern among some that the exit polls and the final tallies couldn’t have been that far apart.
Questions, questions.