9 Responses to “MUST READ FROM HOT AIR: “HENNEPIN COUNTY KNEW OF MACHINE FAILURE 11 DAYS OUT””

1. Leroy Jenkins Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

   Why didn’t this election judge get the machine fixed?

   Morrissey owes it to us all to out his source, and let the courts have their way with him/her, if, in fact, they knew about a broken machine and did nothing to get it fixed.

2. Kyle Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

   According to West Metro Dem, Mark Richie knew two years ago that some of the voting machines couldn’t transmit their results.

   TWO YEARS!!!

3. MUST READ FROM HOT AIR: “HENNEPIN COUNTY KNEW OF MACHINE FAILURE 11 DAYS OUT” Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:08 pm

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4. Kyle Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:09 pm

   Mark Richie presided over a most wide-spread failure of Minnesota’s election counting and reporting system in state history.

   He had over 700 days to work with election officials across the state to verify, remedy and check problems with the state’s voting apparatus.

   He failed to fulfill even the most basic duty of his office.

   Mark Richie is a disgrace.

5. Kyle Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

   The only thing Richie accomplished in his two years in office, apparently, was to figure out how to steal state-owned email lists and use them to solicit campaign donations.

   Mark Richie is a disgrace.

6. Leroy Jenkins Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:29 pm

   So, clean elections are not the goal. Partisan divide remains the rule of law?

   Good to know.

   If this election judge knew the machines were broken, he/she should have demanded that it be fixed. Waiting until after the election to tell a republican blogger about the broken machine is not productive for anything other than widening the partisan divide. An honorable person would have tried to get the machine fixed instead of waiting to score cheap points.

7. Kyle Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:32 pm

   Clean elections are the goal, Leroy. So are competent ones. How did Mark Richie fuck this up so badly?

8. Kyle Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 1:34 pm

   “If this election judge knew the machines were broken, he/she should have demanded that it be fixed…. ”

   I agree fully. Moreover, according to West Metro Dem, it was known in 2006 that a few of these same machines had difficulty transmitting results. Mark Richie had two years to work with county election officials to ensure a flawless election. Instead, in 2008, nearly every machine in the state was inoperable in its basic function of securely transmitting it’s tallies.

   How did Mark Richie fuck this up so badly?

9. Greg Lang Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 10:39 pm

   I retired from Hennepin County a year ago and a few years before that I worked with the mainframe computers there. My information may be a bit dated but here goes.

   Even five years ago there were a large number of modem dial in lines. This was being replaced with
   encrypted internet access so the number of wired lines was decreasing. This probably led to the switch to wireless modems, since there were fewer wired lines.

   With the mainframe computer there is something called an Initial Program Load or IPL. This is basically “rebooting” the mainframe computer and having it start up again with a program with modifications. It’s sort of like the “windows update” where your computer has to restart but on a far larger scale. A wide variety of services are provided through the mainframe and they try to
   eliminate downtime as much as possible. On a huge scale it is like your website being “down” where it cannot be viewed or updated. As I recall, they could go a month or more between IPL’s and they were striving to make the intervals betwwen IPL’s longer. My specific involvement here was five or six years ago, and up to a year ago I received work emails about an IPLs. I don’t recall the intervals the last few years.

   Specifically, a copy of the previous IPL program is sent to the computer maker (IBM?) who programs in the “updates”. The IPL program is then sent back where “changes” since the last IPL are added.

   To give a simple comparison, lets say you backed up you computer on Monday and on Tuesday I gave you my new phone number. If you crashed the computer on Wednesday and had to restore from the backup my new phone number would not be in there.

   Basically, the same with the IPL. I would guess that someone set up the modem IP address before the primary and either didn’t file a change notice or it got lostand wasn’t applied. Thus it would would work in pre-primary testing and during the primary. If there was an IPL between the primary and the election and change update wasn’t applied an old or “null” IP address would be applied during the IPL. Basically a file “voteold” was replaced with “votenew” but during the IPL this was overridden with “voltold” because the file hadn’t been updated before the IPL.

   Most of the time temporary fixes for this can be made but this is complicated if you have a high level of security. Basically, in the high security areas (usually financial or criminal records) there is a built in redundency.

   If this is the case a another IPL would be needed to install the “votenew” file. This is a good anti-hacking security measure but the IPLs have high cost in downtime and money.

   Also, perhaps the change was made but it didn’t take.

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