I can’t begin to fathom the sticky wicket (“Eww, your wicket is all sticky!”) of voter drama that’s been happening across this country in the past few years. The Were-they-counted-correctly? What-side-counted-them? Were-the-voters-who-voted-registered? Who-held-back-what? and Were-the-machines-even-working-correctly? questions rise and fall on who owns what narrative and where the votes supposedly took place. No matter who you believe or what side you are on, arguably, we’d all have to admit there needs to be better vigilance when tallying the count on who is and who is not elected.
As I write this, what was just unearthed in an Ocean Township school election (that’s down ‘south’ New Jersey way), just puts another nail in the coffin of voter machine software workings. There came a recount to this recent election due to a software screw-up that counted some votes twice. That recount, it seems, has been recounted, and the winner who had been declared has been undeclared in the hand recount that was just completed.
Are you following all this recounting? Frankly my head is spinning!
To be fair, the count was very close, 3,523 to 3,503, and the person who was supposedly the winner way back when did not oppose the recount when he heard he was no longer elected. The Monmouth County Board of Elections and the Monmouth County Superintendent filed applications for the recount after the software issues were discovered, and it seems, so far, things have moved as smoothly as they can…with human recounting righting the problem.
Score one for the humans!
The elections were tabulated originally by the Election Systems and Software’s election software.
In the end, the oft-paraphrased quip about the futility of voting, often attributed to Mark Twain, seems most applicable in here. As the saying goes: “If voting mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
‘Doing it’ certainly seems suspect in our present state, New Jersey or otherwise.
