- As The BRAD BLOG reported last week,
a Conservative Republican former Texas Supreme Court Justice had been considering
an Election Contest after electronic voting machine problems and inexplicable
tallies plagued the first-in-the-nation March 7th primary in the Lone Star
State.
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- Steve Smith -- who ran for election to
the state Supreme Court, Place 2, in the Republican primary against an
opponent backed by both Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry and the Bush
family -- will be filing an official Election Contest this afternoon in
Travis County District Court, The BRAD BLOG has learned.
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- Since our previous report, the Smith
for Supreme Court campaign has been examining election tallies around the
state and report that they continue to find anomolies in virtually every
county they look into.
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- "The more research we do, the more
irregularities we find," campaign manager David Rogers told The BRAD
BLOG this morning.
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- The problems are being found on machines
made by both Hart InterCivic and Election Systems and Software, Inc. (ES&S)
-- the two major Electronic Voting Machine vendors supplying the state
of Texas.
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- Rogers says the campaign plans to file
the Contest before 5pm (CT) today. The Contest (to be posted in full here
when available) will outline some of the many problems they have found
so far including counties "where there were more votes than voters."
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- They hope the Election Contest may allow,
for the first time, a closer examination of both the Hart InterCivic and
ES&S electronic voting machines used in Texas elections, as well as
elsewhere around the country.
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- An earlier statement from the campaign
had detailed a number of the campaign's initial findings including several
mysterious totals in Smith's home county of Tarrant where officials admit
some 100,000 votes were incorrectly added to the reported results on Election
Night.
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- Smith had outperformed his statewide
average in Tarrant County during the 2004 Election by 13%, but this year,
his campaign reports, he underperformed the statewide results by 23%. One
other such puzzling number reported previously by Smith's campaign:
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- Winkler County, which went for Smith
by margins of 260-92 (74%) and 468-249 (65%) in the 2002 and 2004 elections,
went against Smith by an unbelievable 0-273 (100%) margin. Governor Perry
received only 83% of the vote in Winkler County, and no other contested
candidate topped 80%. The propositions on the ballot topped out at 93%.Says
Rogers, "We are contesting the state as a whole, but looking at specific
larger counties where there problems and a few of the smaller counties
where the mistakes were absolutely egregious." ...
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- The full story with many more details...
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- http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002615.htm
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