In One County, 4,000 People Showed Up to Vote But Didn’t — Or Did They?

The post In One County, 4,000 People Showed Up to Vote But Didn’t — Or Did They? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

More than 4,000 voters in a single Pennsylvania county headed to their local polling places on Election Day, stepped into the booth and, at the moment of decision, seemingly cast their vote for no one, records show.

Not for President-elect Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. Not for Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein.

Nor did they pick a single candidate for US Senate, Congress, state attorney general, state legislature, or town supervisor.

Yet machine records confirm that these Montgomery County voters went to the trouble of showing up. They then either decided to withhold their vote or something prevented their votes from being recorded.

This mountain of so-called No Votes, regarded as “implausible” by Stein’s legal team, is now at the heart of her appeal for a recount of Pennsylvania’s presidential race that awarded the state’s 20 delegates to Trump.

Maazel said that a “juvenile password structure” and “antiquated technology,” make these machines — used around the state and in much of the country on Nov. 8th — especially penetrable by hackers and malware.

With a federal judge promising a ruling Monday morning — and a Tuesday deadline bearing down on Pennsylvania to certify the results — Stein’s lawyers say that the No Votes suggest that machines tabulating the vote simply wiped them from their memory.

In all, Montgomery County’s election records show that 4,087 ballots out of nearly 450,000 cast there were registered as No Votes. Montgomery, a suburban community of 750,000 north of Philadelphia, supported Clinton over Trump by 21 percentage points.

“Thousands of votes almost certainly did not count,” said Stein’s chief lawyer on the case, Ilann Maazel, at a hearing Friday in Federal District Court in Philadelphia.