First up is this post from GBK: Anarchy in the PWCRC during HOD-51 Voting:
Faisal Gill supporter Charles confirms that no record was kept of who cast ballots. No list of delegates by precincts was available at the ballot boxes. Delegate badges were not collected, encouraging people who enjoyed voting once to go for the gusto and do it again.
The delegate badges were marked by members of BOTH campaigns at the time they were given ballots. Nobody could "vote again" unless members of BOTH campaigns decided to hand out a ballot to a person whose badge was already marked.
remember that HOD-51 voting was weighted according to precinct. The fewer the number of people who voted in each precinct, the more each vote counted. Thus a vote that was cast in the wrong precinct would have skewed the results by changing the mathematical weight attached to that vote.
GBK correctly recognizes the importance of "weighted voting" but misses the irony in his histrionics. In fact, as I noted in THIS POST, Lake Ridge was not only "overvoted", it also was over-voted, meaning a lot more people showed up to vote than votes assigned. In fact, a vote in Lake Ridge was only worth 0.53 votes -- the 2nd-lowest counting vote in the convention. If you wanted to move people around, moving them to Lake Ridge was about the worst thing you could do. BTW, the worst precinct, Bethel (.41) was also won easily by Gill (and only had 4 undervotes). In contrast, each vote in Occaquan was worth 1.17 votes.
Many people left the convention early without voting, because of interminable delays. Perhaps some of those who left early gave their ballot or their badge to someone else, to vote in their place. Did badges have photos on them? I doubt it.
A total of 38 out of 634 left early, about 6%, hardly "many". But you couldn't give your badge to someone else, because the volunteers were checking ID at the table before they gave you your ballot, and ballots were not handed out ahead of time.
Roberts Rules of Order, Newly Revised (10th ed.), page 402, lines 26-34, states that in such cases the vote tallies for those precincts should be thrown out:
if one or more ballots are identifiable as cast by persons not entitled to vote, and it can be established that there are not other such ballots, these ballots are excluded in determining the number of votes case for purpose of computing the majority. If there is evidence that any unidentifiable ballots were cast by persons not entitled to vote, and if there is any possibility that such ballots might affect the result, the entire ballot vote is null and void and a new ballot vote must be taken.
Faisal's employee and PWCRC chair Tom Kopko has refused to nullify the ballots in the two overvoted HOD-51 precincts. If he did, Faisal Gill would lose and Julie Lucas would win.
Reading is our friend. It doesn't say the "precinct", it says the entire balloat, that's ALL the precincts. And it doesn't say they are "thrown out", it says "null and void and a NEW BALLOT VOTE MUST BE TAKEN".
The convention decided NOT to take another vote, but rather decided, as Robert's Rules allows, that the overvote error would not affect the result. That was their perogative, although the Luca campaign could have appealed that decision to the chair. But they didn't.
Now it is too late to use the Robert's remedy, as there is no way that a new "ballot vote" can be taken. That's why you appeal AT the convention, when there is still a way to handle the problem.
Robert's rules does NOT support selectively removing ballots from a race -- it clearly states that if the error is deemed to affect the result, the remedy is a NEW ballot, not eliminating the ballots you think might be a problem.
OK, that's all I have time for tonight.
2 comments:
Charles,
JM,PHd is a master of propaganda. Rule #1: Always tell the technical truth. Something that is sometimes lost on BVBL. It's the false conclusions you want the reader to draw from the technical "truths" you present that distingushes propaganda from other sorts of communication. If BVBL wants to get better, perhaps he should read "Public Opinion and Propaganda" edited for the Society for the Psycological Study of Social Issues, Holt Reinhart,1954 or "Psychological Warfare" by Paul M. A. Linebarger, Infantry Journal Press, 1948.
Dr. JM certainly does not need to do any more reading on the topic of propaganda. His stuff has the look and feel of mid-1950's Soviet writings. Kind of clumsy, but all of the factual material is technically "true". He gets it. Comrade Dr. JM's stuff is really entertaining. Makes us old guys kind of nostalgic for the Cold War. Unfortunately for Comrade Dr., most readers with half a brain get what he is trying to do too.
Charles,
John Milton went blind because he was so busy conducting Oliver Cromwell's psycological warfare that he disregarded the doctor's warning and abused his aling sight. And the sad thing about it was that it was not very good psycological warfare.
Milton fell into the common booby-trap of refuting his opponents item by item, thus leaving them the strong affirmative position, instead of providing a positive and teachable statement of his own faith.
A Frechman called Claude de Saumaise wrote a highly critical book about the English, and Milton seems to have lost his temper and his judgment. In his two books against Saumaise, Milton then commited almost every mistake in the whole schedule of psycological warfare. He moved from his own ground of argument over to the enemy's. He wrote at excessive lenght. He indulged in some of the nastiest name-calling to be found in literature, and went into considerable detail to describe Saumaise in unattractive terms. He slung mud whenever he could. These books are read today, under threat-of-death, by Ph.D candidates, but no one else is known to find them attractive. In these texts, written by Milton in Latin but now available in English, folks who are wearying of the monotonous invective can find extensive additions to their vocabulary.
Milton turned to disappointment and poetry; the world is the gainer.
Most of the above is from Linebarger's book. As true today as when Milton was penning his diatribes.
HAPPY 4TH OF JULY. MAY GOD BLESS AMERICA AND ALL OF OUR TROOPS WHO ARE IN HARMS WAY THIS DAY.
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