America will never solve its gun problem until it gets over its fetish for the Founding Fathers.

[questionseverything]

187. ct thing?

we documented the "moving numbers"

we asked every election official from the county to the state,trying to find a reasonable explaination

from the article...So What The Hell Is Going On?

It's taken a week or so of going from one election official to another to to unwind the mess, and only some of the anomalies detailed above were finally explained.

In trying to sort it all out, The BRAD BLOG spoke to a clerk at the Secretary of State's office, the State's Director of Elections and, on the local level, the Monroe County Clerk, Election Commissioner and Elections Coordinator. None of them were able to explain the most troubling aspect of the numbers.

State Election Director Carter Hawkins was able to explain the reason for the 0% undervote issue, in both the May 19th numbers, as well as the later, officially certified numbers of May 25th.

He told us that the way Arkansas calculates turnout is by adding up votes cast in the largest race (or, in the case of a primary election like the one on May 18th, the largest race in each party's election), discounting all of the overvotes and undervotes, and using that number as "voter turnout."

"We are the only state that does that," Hawkins said, acknowledging the misleading nature of discounting voters who may have either chosen not to vote, or didn't have their vote counted --- for any number of reasons --- in the top race. Doing it that way certainly makes it difficult for citizen-oversight and spotting problem areas where there may be an unusually high number of undervotes, due to machine malfunction or foul play.

"We are working to revise the way we calculate turnout," he told us. "That's one of my goals for 2011."

As to the impossible May 19th results and the subsequent, staggering change to the final numbers as certified by the county, nobody seems to be able to explain them.

"It could be data entry errors," Pam Ratliff, a clerk at the Sec. of State's office guessed when we first contacted them. "The only thing I can tell you, I didn't do that, so I don't know," she said before promising to have Hawkins call us back the next day.