Absentee and provisional statistics are available as “issued” and finally “counted” leaving percentages of each.

New York, less than 15 percent
Minnesota 10.9 percent
Vermont less than 10 percent (SoS says official numbers aren’t avail. yet, but that’s what she’s predicting)
New Hampshire 15 percent
Rhode Island 7 percent
Delaware 22 percent
Wisconsin less than 10 percent

Also, simply because your precinct is close to GWU does not mean that you should have more voters. Many college students choose not to register in their college towns but remain registered in their home states. Agree with the practice or not, it happens everywhere and frankly, if I were from Ohio but went to the school in D.C. I would stay registered in Ohio.

And finally, as for the mistakes that occurred in D.C. on Tuesday. There is no doubt that they are unacceptable, however the District is not alone with these types of problems and yet no one questions the ability of those other states to have representation in Congress.

Let me clarify my comment, which was not about the “bureaucrats” but about what I perceive to be a pathetic lack of involvement on the part of the electorate/citizenry, particularly in Ward 2.

According to the latest D.C. BOEE Ward 2 election day results (which have changed each time I revisit the site), the total number of Ward 2 registered voters eligible to participate in Tuesday’s election was 33,685. Of that total, 5,334 voted for an average turnout of 15.83%.

Add to this the dysfunctionality and errors outlined in my original posting–which MUST be addressed and corrected–and it paints a pretty sad picture of “Democracy” in our nation’s capital.

Nope. Those stats don’t argue against DC Home Rule (or representation, I’m not sure which one you’re talking about), they argue against party primaries.

Spending public money on elections closed to anyone but party members, which exist simply to advantage the affiliated over the unaffiliated: That’s un-American.

That’s a profoundly un-American attitude, depriving citizens of their rights in order to somehow punish the bureaucrats. Presumably Florida and Ohio and all the other places that have had voting problems deserve to have their statehood revoked?

At 7:55 pm on election day, I went in to get the final vote count from one of the poll workers. She had tracked the votes by party and further broken it out by paper and electronic ballot.

The current DCBOEE Precinct 2 online results continue to differ (on the low side) from the numbers I was given. There was one Statehood-Green Party vote that also does not show on the DCBOEE site.

Early in the day a neighbor–a PhD in statistics who has taught all over the world–went in to vote and didn’t emerge for nearly 30 minutes. When he finally appeared, he related that he had tried to vote touch screen, gave up in frustration after several tries, and did a paper ballot.

About 5 minutes into our chat afterward, a pollworker came chasing out in a panic because they had forgotten to get him to sign the book before he voted!!!

When he emerged the second time he said, statistically speaking, we should not be using touch screen/electronic technology once every 2 or 4 years to do voting. It’s one thing to be using e-mail and cellphones everyday but the voting technology is too complex and prone to failure.

In my opinion, every touchscreen ballot citywide in Tuesday’s election is suspect and needs to be verified.

Further, there was a special grant project for voter accessibility going on throughout election day–we had at least five workers, including a young pregnant woman, visit Precinct #2 for accessibility. Around 5:00 pm, one of the workers (from Chicago) came over to chat with me.

I mentioned how bad the accessibility was at Precinct #4–the West End Library–and he agreed. His project had arranged for DCBOEE to have an additional machine set up on the first floor and when he went to check it at 5:30 pm on Monday, it was nowhere to be found.

Ironically, we were told late Monday evening at the BOEE that because of a missing cartridge, that West End was the non-reporting precinct, something City Desk confirmed late yesterday along with the news that DCBOEE had found the third cartridge with nothing on it. This is an outrage and should also be brought to light–clearly, the first floor station was never set up.

At the LEAST, there should be (1) a hand recount of the paper ballots; (2) a total voter count including every voter that signed in and voted, and (3) a check of the number of electronic totals against signature totals minus paper ballots–in every Ward 2 precinct.

P.S. Here we are in our nation’s capital with some of the wealthiest individuals and neighborhoods in the City located in Ward 2 and with less than 9% of registered Democratic voters showing up to the polls. If ever there was a case for not giving DC the vote, this fiasco is it.

Kudos for the excellent articles. Will tuck in a headline for your work on Black Box Voting today.

Historical note: In 2006, there was an election day turnout of 103,476 (42,421 this year, with no mayoral race). 3,316 absentees were cast (1.03%) and 2,989 provisionals (0.93%).