Re: OT: Election technology question

From: John Smith (a_at_nonymous.com)
Date: 10/30/04 

Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:04:15 -0400

Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing wrote:
> In article <4182BA87.CFBD490A@teksavvy.com>, JF Mezei
> <jfmezei.spamnot@teksavvy.com> writes:
>> DL Phillips wrote:
>>> Here's a link to an Associated Press news release that addresses
>>> some of your questions.
>>>
>>> <http://www.ap.org/pages/about/whatsnew/whatsnew.html>
>>
>> Thanks. So AP has people who are at the counting sites who call in
>> the numbers. But the document still doesn't describe the interface
>> between AP and the media organisations.
>>
>> There is an interesting paragraph about how their servers are built
>> with lots of failover and fallback to different data centre. Sounds
>> like a job of VMS. Does anyone know what technology they use for
>> this ?
>>
>> I can understand why, no matter what OS, the manufacturer woudln't
>> want to publicsize this since any voting problems would reflect
>> badly (even if the problem is totally unrelated to the AP systems).
>>
>> Is it correct to state that there is no "official" national election
>> office that tabulates the votes in an official manner and that the
>> media is the one to actually decide which of the two will concede
>> that night?
>
> Or not. (This was a subject of - to put it mildly - some controversy
> in the
> last Presidential election, what with some news organizations calling
> Florida
> for one side, and another calling it for the other, triggering a
> possibly
> premature concession which was then retracted...)
>
>>
>> Do the states officially declare the winner during the course of the
>> evening, or does that take days before the official pronouncement is
>> made ?
>
> It depends; there may be enough challenges, recount demands, etc,
> etc, to
> delay an official result. The state election agency has some length
> of time (generally specified by the laws or Constitution of that
> state) to "certify
> the election", which makes the result official and binding. So if
> it's
> controversial enough, they'll go out to their deadline, but they have
> so far
> usually called it the same night, and probably most states will call
> it the
> same night this time.

See the following article for some of the tactics employed by Republicans in
previous elections.... http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: Election technology question
    ... >> Here's a link to an Associated Press news release that addresses some ... >publicsize this since any voting problems would reflect badly (even if the ... last Presidential election, what with some news organizations calling Florida ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: OT/ US Election 2008
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