Donna Edwards, Albert Wynn's progressive opponent in MD-04's Democratic primary,
will challenge the results of this past Tuesday's election, the complete results of which are still unknown.
Candidate Donna Edwards, who is locked in a tight race with Rep. Albert Wynn for the Democratic nomination in district four, today said she intends to challenge returns from two or three precincts where voting cards were allegedly left unsecured overnight.
Edwards says Prince George's County voting officials who did not complete the ballot count on Tuesday night, left electronic voters cards in a truck overnight without security.
The Prince George's Board of Elections stopped counting votes around 2:30 Wednesday morning and resumed around 9:30 a.m. Results from more than 130 precincts were input using computer cards that election officials hand-carried to the board's office after equipment malfunctions.
...
``I'm really concerned, deeply concerned, about the integrity of the election," Edwards said. Thousands of provisional ballots, which could determine the outcome of the election are to be counted on Monday.
The legal action is being taken because, ``When the [voter] cards were entered, we saw some troubling shifts in the vote count," Edwards said.
According to the
Maryland Elections Board, the current results are as follows:
Wynn (i) Dem 39,017 49.94%
Edwards Dem 36,081 46.18%
McDermott Dem 3,032 3.9%
According to my notes, at 8:30a.m. Wednesday morning the district-wide totals were as follows:
Wynn (i) Dem 25,478 47.73%
Edwards Dem 25,694 48.14%
McDermott Dem 2,202 4.13%
The overall Prince George's County numbers currently:
Wynn (i) Dem 30,812 56.83%
Edwards Dem 21,699 40.02%
McDermott Dem 1,709 3.15%
Considering that Prince George's County is Wynn's stronghold compared to Montgomery, does the shift that resulted fall outside of the overall Prince George's County numbers?
Here's an e-mail which was posted by Matt Stoller over at MyDD:
FYI, on Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 pm a truckload of machines and cards from three precincts rolled into the board of elections in Prince George's County -- polls had closed at 8:00 pm on Tuesday. No one at the Board of Elections can account for the whereabouts of this truckload of ballots until it showed up at 5:00 pm on Wednesday. These ballots were from precincts that we had canvassed and phonebanked heavily. The reports from the precincts were radically different from all the other 203 precincts that had reported, through which we held a balance of 56-40 (Wynn) in Prince George's -- the lost truckload of ballots came in with a 10 percent margin shift which significantly altered the count out of Prince George's County. I'm not a statistician, but this may be a statistic impossibility. We're trying to get to the bottom of all of this, in addition to counting all the absentee and provisional ballots that are outstanding.
Based on the PG figures posted on the Maryland Elections site, the PC County vote has held steady at 56-40 Wynn (with no substantial shift). Though, perhaps, the PG totals which are posted are outdated. Either way, Wynn looks to have simply won PG County handily enough to reach his current ~3,000 vote lead.
Regardless of whether or not there were election shenanigans favorable to Wynn, it doesn't hurt to re-verify questionable methods and practices if the option is available. With a reported 5,000 provisionals and ~1,500 (a very rough estimate) absentees left to be counted, we'll have to wait until Monday for a winner to be announced. Perhaps not even then.
Edwards isn't alone in her calls as Prince George's County Executive challenger Rushern Baker is also mounting a challenge, calling for an investigation into this past Tuesday's primary results in PG County. As of yesterday morning, Baker trailed current PG County Executive Jack Johnson, 52-48% with two outstanding precincts remaining.
According to Bruce Godfrey at Crablaw, the Edwards campaign will be holding a rally at the Montgomery County Board of Elections this coming Monday at 9:30a.m., to coincide with the counting of the remaining provisionals.
Donna Edwards also joined Taylor Marsh in an interview earlier today. (Here's the mp3.) In it is detailed many of the voting problems voters faced in MD-04, including voters who were forced to vote on scrap pieces of paper because precincts had run out of provisional ballots.
Among Edwards' strongest points, the necessity of mandated paper trails for electronic voting machines which would allow for machine-by-machine, precinct-by-precinct results which can be reviewed after-the-fact.
Regardless of the ultimate result from Tuesday's primary, Edwards stated in the Marsh interview quite clearly that she'll be running again in '08 versus Wynn if she doesn't prevail.
Albert Wynn, you're on notice!
Update [2006-9-15 19:58:18 by jorndorff]: Stoller has just posted this over at MyDD:
The polls closed on Tuesday evening, but voting machines in anywhere between two to eight precincts (probably controlled by Wynn's allies) were not brought in to the Maryland Board of Elections until the next day. On Wednesday at 5pm, observers saw a white moving truck pull up and deliver voting machines from several precincts in Wynn-favoring Prince George's county, one of which the Edwards campaign heavily canvassed. Though memory cards were supposed to be taken out immediately after voting closed, these machines had their memory cards still in them. Though no one can yet prove that Wynn's people tampered with the machines, the margin on those machines went for Wynn by around 65-35, which is out of line with the rest of the county. The rest of the county had it at 57 or so for Wynn.
I still don't see the shift in the numbers which is claimed, though. Wynn was solidly up 56-40 and that's where he remains, according to the latest available data from Prince George's. (Though the hard numbers from the precincts in question would be nice.)