Phantom Ballots mentioned in Trib-Review
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The Pennsylvania League of Young Voters, which opposes the lack of a paper-ballot backup to Allegheny County’s touch-screen voting machines, warned there remains no independent way to verify vote totals from the machines. A recent study by the group found 311 over-votes in 1,011 precincts in November.
Over-votes occur when the number of votes the machines record exceeds the number of voters elections judges record.
“There aren’t any checks for the ballot in the machine,” said Carly Dobbins-Bucklad, the league’s director.
Wolosik said the discrepancies almost always are the result of human error — for example, an elections judge giving the same number to two voters, making the final count one vote short.
Just want to say — not true about that last point! We looked at the actual voter logs for the precincts with over-votes (or phantom ballots) and looked at the numbers as they counted up the voters. There’s another problem occurring somewhere.
Tags: over votes, Pennsylvania, phantom ballots, voting machines