Staying Lever-Headed; Black Voters' Longstanding Voting-Machine Complaints Persist Amid Dearth of Data

Summary

---

"You don't lose votes on any mechanical voter machine," he says. "The motor that opens and closes the curtain can burn out so that a curtain doesn't engage right [and] won't open, but that's the worst that can happen. Doesn't affect the vote, though."

Observes "Hop" Kendrick: "I'm more concerned with what happens when machines break down for a half a day and instead of waiting around [voters] go home and don't vote. I don't think anyone by design gives [black neighborhoods] more faulty machines but ... it might be our own fault if we don't have the extra commitment to put in that extra [time] to wait until it's fixed so we can vote."

"My people come up to me all the time and say the machines break down in our community more than others," says "Hop" Kendrick. "I never believed in conspiracies, but I've heard them all my life -- and I seen it all, too. I seen blind people regain their sight on Election Day; seen the dead resurrected and had their vote count." Election officials, he says, "don't want these questions to continue to surface. If nobody provides details and answers" -- answers in the form of machine-use data -- "then it becomes suspicious. It needs to be put to rest once and for all."

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Staying Lever-Headed; Black Voters' Longstanding Voting-Machine Complaints Persist Amid Dearth of Data

"The issues really aren't conspiratorial, but basically mechanical," says Carlos Brossard, an independent political consultant from Highland Park, about the health of Allegheny County's voting machines. "Has the county kept records on the error rates of the machines? Records of maintenance or patterns of error? Has the reliability and validity of the machines been tested? Are they tested routinely o...

See the full content of this document

---