“Unintentional but worrisome”

The tone of this article from the AP would be laughable if it weren’t so sad:

A voters' rights group said Wednesday its audit of November's presidential election ballots in Miami-Dade County showed counting problems - and an unintentional but worrisome instance of a number of votes being counted three times.

A report released by the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition said during the elections there were "serious problems with policies and procedures that are supposed to protect the integrity of the ballot."

In many precincts, the number of people who signed in to cast votes was not tracked carefully, or in some cases was not compared with the actual number of ballots cast at those precincts.

The group also said there was a touchscreen machine malfunction; when votes were tallied the results from one machine had been counted three times, creating a discrepancy of 171 votes that became part of the certified canvass, the group said.

"It slid right through and nobody caught it," said Martha Mahoney, a professor at University of Miami and a group member.

Fifteen of Florida's 67 counties used touchscreen machines, including most of the heavily populated ones.

Election officials welcomed the criticism and said the machine that gave a 3-for-1 tally has been sent for testing.

"We generally think that the more voices that you have the better off you are," said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the elections office.

Kind of fucking alarming, I’d say. That the only quotes included in the article are as dispassionate and generic as a tin of mushroom soup is pathetic. We should be outraged at this situation. We should be up in arms that we are being placated with a solution like sending the machine “for testing.” We should be crying foul from every corner of the country, asking what has happened to our democracy. We should be demanding to know whether there is any relationship between this revelation and the claims made by Clint Curtis. And we should certainly not let the lackluster reporting of such irregularities dictate our reaction.

As an aside, I haven’t seen any comment from Mr. Kerry.