If the machines are bad, or there is not enough of them, election officers cannot do much about that, but there are thousands of ways a good election officer can help.

there were reports of the machines malfunctioning in the Philly precints. The Voters Group went to court requesting a judge to extend voting hours. That plea was rejected.

what was the tally? As long as it was not double digits. Can't take the crowing.

Kos has it at 9-point diff. 99.07% of precints reporting.

Hillary said 'the tide has turned' or some such something. Tide has turned. Indeed.

from the paper that endorsed Hillary, the NY Times editorial board

The low road to victory

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the  process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as ed=print&oref=slogin]the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad -- torn right from Karl Rove's playbook -- evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," the narrator intoned.

[.]

It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.

and Matt Yglesias cries out Save Us!

Amen


Well, "You can't vote for war and disown the results"

roughly two thirds of the test subjects didn't notice when our homebrew DRE system was lying on its summary screen. In fact, they gave our machine exceptionally high marks. They loved it.

In other words, there's a pretty good chance that if the voting machines in PA were flipping one in every ten votes from Obama to Clinton and showing the flip on their summary screen, no-one would notice. The handful that did notice would write it off as user error, and go back and correct it. There would be no widespread evidence of "mistaken" summary screens. Hell, it probably wouldn't even show up in certification testing. One in ten votes would simply mysteriously shift to the other column, the machine would tell the user about it, and no-one would notice. Even a printed paper record has the same problem.

There are two acceptable answers to the voting problem so far: hand-counted paper ballots and optically scanned paper ballots. Nothing else is acceptable. Ever.