Report on Phantom Ballots in Allegheny County available
Now available is our report on the “phantom ballots” that were recorded in Allegheny County in the 2008 general election. PA Verified Voting helped us organize a coalition of voters to conduct the audits of the voting machine logs
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT (pdf)
We discovered that almost 16% of all precincts recorded “phantom” ballots, which means more votes are recorded than there were voters there to cast them. We estimate that there were about 400 phantom votes recorded total for the whole county.
This amount of phantom votes isn’t enough to have affected the outcome of the presidential election. But, since local elections generally have a much lower turnout than a presidential election, a few hundred votes can easily make a big enough difference to sway a close race.
We think voters have a right to know their voting machines are working. It’s going to open up a whole world of possible contested elections around here until this is fixed. The next step would be for the county to make the audit logs for the machines available, so that the origin of the phantom ballots could be determined. Right now the county is not releasing those. Until they do, it’s going to be hard to address this problem.
Tags: allegheny county, audit, ballot, cast, electronic, logs, phantom ballots, pittsburgh, voter, voting machines