2004 Ballot Recount: Observer Report

• December 16, 2004:
  Report by Green Party Observer

December 16, 2004:
Report by Green Party Observer

Brown's recount seemed to be conducted quite fairly and went smoothly on Tuesday, although I'm not at all convinced that is any indication that there is nothing wrong, especially if employees of Triad are going in and "fixing" machines prior to the recount. But Brown is also a *very* conservative county where one would expect very few votes for anyone but Bush, so it doesn't surprise me that they were so cordial and fair about everything.

Our observer reported that Brown only had a certain number of precincts which weren't too large for the three percent sample, so the BoE put these in a hat and had the observers pull them out until the number equalled at least three percent. He thought this was very fair and would meet the requirements for "random" precinct selection.

Everything else seemed to run without a hitch in Brown and the BoE and everyone there were very friendly (they were even cracking jokes, he said). He said the three percent manual count and the machine count matched on Tuesday. But then he realized that they had forgotten to check the poll books, so the BoE let them come back on Wednesday and check the books and the numbers. Everything seemed to match up according to our observer, who should be sending a written report in the next couple of days.