“The problems we observed with these ballots are serious,” San Francisco attorney Catharine Baker said in an e-mail to Harmer supporters and the media on Friday afternoon, Dec. 10.
Nevertheless, Harmer said earlier that McNerney's lead is large enough to not warrant a recount. McNerney received 115,361 votes (48.0 percent) to Harmer's 112,703 votes (46.9 percent).
Baker said that the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters office conducted the count properly, but she questions operations in Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties.
“Signatures are required by law on vote-by-mail ballots to ensure that the voter whose ballot is cast is the one who completed that ballot and that the person who turns in another voter's ballot is authorized to do so,” Baker said.
“If poll workers do not ensure that the required signatures are on the vote-by-mail ballots delivered at the polls, we voters lose an important line of defense against voter fraud,” she added.
Absentee ballots are now officially known as vote-by-mail ballots.
According to Baker, Alameda County approved ballots that had ballot signatures that didn't match the registered voters' signature, absentee and provisional ballots for which there was no registration signature on file and some absentee ballots that didn't have the voter's signature on the ballot at all.
However, Harmer attorneys and volunteers were prohibited in Alameda County from challenging whether ballots should be counted, Baker said.
In Santa Clara County, Harmer volunteers witnessed staff from the registrar's office approving ballots that lacked the voter's signature, Baker said.
In Contra Costa, they couldn't tell whether the count was being conducted properly, the attorney said.
"For much of the review, volunteers (in Contra Costa County) were only able to observe signature verification from behind a glass wall several feet away from staff, making it impossible to see clearly the signatures being compared," Baker said.
The registrar of voters offices in Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties were closed Sunday, Dec. 12, and unavailable for comment.
The 11th Congressional District includes the Lodi area, most of San Joaquin County, plus Brentwood, most of the San Ramon and Livermore valleys, and the city of Morgan Hill in Santa Clara County.
I'm not so sure, Arroyo, that he wouldn't change his religion if he thought it could maybe get him elected. Former credit card debt collector, two-faced stimulus critic who took stimulus money, unemployed deadbeat who collected unemployment benefits while spouting Republican line about the 'virtue' of not extending benefits to those in need, proponent of denying affordable health care to impoverished parents and their children. Called out dems for being 'arrogant' in wanting to spend ("his") money on govt'l programs, while he had no qualms about using unemployment compensation to supplement the bail-out bonus money he received. Please! This isn't a problem of his religion. It's a problem of being two-faced and his followers willing to forgive him for it. Dream all you might for redistricting, which I'm beginning to think is nothing more than tea party code for wishful gated communities that lock the you-know-who people outside the gates.
and:
In that forthcoming "more detailed report" that is being promised, I'd like to hear how Harmer got by receiving unemployment benefits for all those weeks without looking seriously for a job other than politician. Kind of smells like arriving at the welfare office in a Cadillac to me. But, no matter, his supporters were okay with him being an unemployed carpetbagger, and they got all that they deserved.
and:Really can't agree with the assessment of why he lost. Harmer's never was a 'winning campaign' as he attests. There was only the illusion of being a 'winning campaign' after a right-wing pollster fudged some numbers early on, thereby creating the false narrative that Harmer was ahead (and which the so-called liberal media uncritically accepted, without so much as a peep of healthy skepticism). So, too, the mularky about being outspent. If outspending one's opponent is to be a criterion for winning, as Harmer seems to be claiming, then Meg Whitman should have won by 6 million votes. No, the enthusiasm of the people was clearly behind McNerney, from start to finish.
I was at the forum when the two (three, if you want to include the goofball) candidates debated. McNerney's supporters outnumbered Harmer's supporters by two to one. The impassioned voices from the sea of blue-clad college kids and young workers and people of color drowned out the desperately dying squawks coming from the island of red oldsters.