McCain's speaker sucked... Thompson's sucked... Huckabee has the most support--BUT NO SPEAKER?
NO RP SPEAKER.
It has come to my attention that Du Page County is supposedly one of the worst places to cast a ballot in the US due to the type of voting machines it has. I have just begun to look into this but I think it worthwhile that we investigate this claim. Whether or not we can effect a change in voting procedures before the Nov 2008 election, of course, is problematic at best. Here is an excerpt from the web site:
WORST PLACES TO VOTE IN AMERICA
Riverside County has long been tied with DuPage County, Illinois in the Black Box Voting "Worst Places to Vote in America" rankings. As Riverside steps out of the top two, a contender from Kentucky threatens to blow by the whole bunch: Bullitt County, home of mismatched votes and family-run government. Updates on DuPage and Bullitt soon.
Here is a link to a post at the BlackBox voting web site where this article appeared:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/54216.html?1184354443
OK, after rewatching the whole thing, the posters that have stated that a man picked up a stack of clearly more than 3 ballots and said, "Ron Paul 3" is absolutely correct!!! It's about half way through the recording. There is a woman in a beige sweater with a Rudy sticker and a man with glasses and a checked shirt county ballots while sitting on aluminum chairs. The camera fixes on the Ron Paul stack, which by my count had 5! It then panned to the man who up until this point slowly, one by one, counted each candidates ballots and then announced the number. When he picked up Ron Paul's he didn't count them just said, "Ron Paul 3"!! It may only be "2" votes buy this is right under the nose of a camera! Not all precincts had cameras in their faces!
In regards to Permanent Chair John Werden, guy running the show with a Romney sticker (nah, non-biased chairman) he stated that he would ask for candidate speakers in alphabetical order. His alphabetical order was:
Guiliani ~ speaker
Hunter ~ asked for speaker - no volunteer
Huckabee ~ asked for speaker - no volunteer
McCain ~ speaker
Romney ~ The Chairman himself spoke on behalf of Romney
Thompson ~ speaker
Followed by..."Did I miss any candidate Representation? (one second pause), "OK, Let's go ahead"!
First, Paul comes before Romney, and nice of him to leave Ron Paul off the list.
Werden then went on to say that they have one envelope per ward (4), but that's not going to work so just throw your ballots into anyone and it will get to the vote counting. It didn't seem as anyone was keeping an eye on the Ward #1 envelope. It ended up being left with a man who appeared not to know what to do with it. As far as I'm concerned, this is not a safe guarded process. The fact that they are voting on notepads of someone running for governor alone blew my mind! What is this a third world country.
While they were still conting votes in Carroll County a breaking news alert shows up at the bottom of the screen stating "AP, CNN, ABC, NBC project Mike Huckabee wins Iowa GOP Caucuses. Mitt Romney comes in second." Bit premature don't ya think! The people at Carroll were still dividing them up into wards!~
It was also mentioned by John Werden that there were 4 "phantom ballots" that were not marked what ward or no inititals.
As they announced each candidates vote count (not percentage) I wrote them down. Then when Ian Granstra ~ Secretary of the Caucus called in the numbers, they matched what I had. The final tally also matched what I had.
Dawnbt....reporting....
charger
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I just posted on this.
Review the tape. During the vote counting a guy and a girl were counting votes.
The guy counted them and the girl recorded them.
The guy would count each vote for each candidate. When he came to Dr. Paul's stack of votes he picked up the whole stack and told the girl there were only 3 votes.
The camera had just zoomed out from the stacks of votes and the stack that the camera zoomed in on had a lot more than 3 votes in it.
The stack said Ron Paul on it.
That's exactly what I thought I saw this morning looking at the tape and thought I'd look again later.........looked like about 7 in that stack and 3 was called out and written down. I did the full 36 min tape and DVD when C-Span repeated it as there was some talk from the start.
Can someone please post this.
I was in Mason City in Cerro Gordo county watching the vote of 16 of the precincts. I have never been to a caucus before, so I am not sure how it is supposed to go, but only about half of the precincts were located in the cafeteria (the main room of the event) and the rest were in classrooms. The precincts counted the votes, tallied them and most were called in before being brought to the cafeteria to be turned in, with only 4 precincts calling in while in front of me. I had gotten permission previously to watch the caucus (from one of the leaders), take pictures and videos and was to be allowed to take pictures of the tally sheets turned in by precinct captains. I had a list of 13 of the 16 precinct captain names and phone numbers with their precinct names, only missing the first and one refused to give me any info except (when pressed) the precinct he was in, before walking off and the last one I missed because of what happened. (Background info) One of the Ron Paul supporters had given me some brochures so he wouldn't have to hold on to the whole stack, which I put into my coat pocket, and pulled the flap over it (which must have pulled back). The guy that tallies the precinct votes brought to him saw the brochures and called me over and confronted me (in the form of yelling after ripping the Ron Paul brochures from my pocket - and throwing them away - and the notes from my hand), saying that I had misrepresented myself and lied (he thought I said I was from the press - never used that word - and that I was from Liberty News - I said I was with http://www.libertybroadcastnetwork.org/ and what the purpose was), etc., and started accusing me of saying stuff I never said. He also accused me of being a paid Ron Paul "Agent" and was there to report false vote information to the website saying that they were all corrupt (even though I was going to take photos of the tally sheets and give them to the website). They wanted to kick me out with no information whatsoever, but the head of the caucus (the caucus chairman I think is the position) had me explain myself and overruled them and said I could get the totals from the caucus but would have to leave immediately after that. I asked if I could still get pictures of the tally sheets and they said that I wouldn't be able to take pictures of the tally sheets because there was personal information of the precinct captains on them, even though before they knew who I supported, they said yes to taking pictures - not yes to just viewing the sheets.
We can track down the personal information of this video happening on cspan and file a official complaint can we not?
youve got to convert this footage somehow, gotta get this on Youtube. Ive heard tons of people talking about this incident.