Sangamon County returns to paper ballots

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Georgia Early Voting Has Some Waiting For Eight Hours At The Polls

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Blast from the Past

This is from a blog entry (in a different blog) that I wrote in December 2004, after the fiasco that passed for the Presidential Election that year. The Wikipedia entry that provided this quote has since been edited and the original link is no longer there. However with a little googling I found that it was written by Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribute:

International monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures fell short in many ways of the best global practices. The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system...

This is an example of what happened then, and what I hope we don't see a repeat of this year.

Phony flier says Virginians vote on different days

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Polling Spot Delays May Deter Minority Voters

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Machines change Dem vote to GOP vote

AND SO IT BEGINS...

Stealing Elections II

Following on from the previous post, here are a couple of useful links:

Steal Back Your Vote!

Video The Vote

Stealing Elections

Every major election has its irregularities; it's not surprising when you consider that there may be hundreds of millions of people voting in a short period of time in thousands of voting stations spread across a continent, and everyone is awaiting the result and wants it to be delivered, like, NOW, that there are going to be mistakes made on occasion.

But when there are a huge number of inconsistencies, to the degree that there is concern that the final result as reported differs from the true result, then it's time to ask some hard questions, and if there's evidence of wrongdoing it should be investigated.

That's almost what happened here in the Good Ol' USA four years ago. I say almost, because the first part definitely happened - there were irregularities, concerns, accusations and in many cases hard evidence that the final counts in some areas didn't reflect the actual votes cast by the electorates.

The hard questions were asked - there's a Wikipedia Article dedicated to the subject - and even today people make reference to the whole sorry episode. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that something was very wrong with the 2004 election.

But what didn't happen was the part about the investigation. That surprised me, because you would have thought that the American people, of all people, would have wanted an assurance that the voting process they use to select their leaders was as fair and correct as was possible. So here was this shitpile of evidence of something being up; an official, independent investigation would have gone a long way to settling the matter one way or the other - either all of the mistakes were innocent, the inevitable errors that you're going to get in a vote this size in a country this size; or a significant number of those 'mistakes' - enough to sway the result - weren't actually mistakes, and there is a group of people out there who perpetrated the biggest vote fraud in recent years. And if that second case is true, then because there was no investigation they got away with it.

I don't want to see this happen again with this upcoming 2008 election. I don't want to hear about exit polls showing significant differences from official results; I don't want to hear about electronic voting machines that can be hacked in under a minute and made to deliberately flip votes; I don't want to hear about votes being destroyed because they were on the wrong kind of paper or a certain checkbox wasn't checked; I don't want to hear about vote counters employed by one party or the other (how is that legal in the first place?) destroying votes for the opposition; I don't want to hear about voters being deliberately misled about where and when they should vote and thereby missing their chance to vote; I don't want to hear about voters being intimidated or harassed, or forced by a shortage of voting stations in some areas to have to wait in line for hours.

And if any of this does happen I do want to hear about an official, independent investigation by people who will have the power to imprison those guilty of any wrongdoing, up to and including the President-elect, if he/she knew what was going on; and who have the power declare the election null and void, and demand a new one, only done right this time.

My New Hero

Keith Olbermann is God

I've seen this guy on streaming video a couple of times and thought he was a thoughtful, sensible guy. But this clip shows that he REALLY knows how to get the point across. And I don't think he's acting out the anger, either - I get the impression that the passion here is 100% Real McCoy:



Say it like it is, dude.

I Feel Better

I feel much better about this election than the last couple. In 2004 I was reasonably confident that the American public wouldn't be so collectively terminally idiotic that they would re-elect the same corrupt, stupid redneck. They did - or at least, that's what the official figures show. I still believe that the election was a sham; there were too many things wrong with it - exit poll figures at odds with the official counts, intimidation of voters, whole areas with uncounted votes. I think it was rigged, and I'm not the only one who does, but the questions got lost in the noise. The average American handed Dubya the KY and bent over; the chimp stayed in the White House when he should have been dragged out in handcuffs.

This time it's a different story. The debate last night made it fairly clear: Obama is definitely the better man for the job. McCain came across as a doddery old fool and his snide little attacks reminded me of a name-calling schoolbrat. He wouldn't have been much less convincing if he'd just sat there making farting noises.

It got me thinking about something that other people have mentioned. McCain is an old man, and it seems to be common knowledge that his health ain't that great. If he gets the vote somehow, and gets sick, Sarah 'batshit crazy' Palin gets the keys to the nuclear arsenal. Isn't that a sobering thought.

But as I said, I feel much better about the whole thing. According to the pollsters, unless something really dumb happens between now and November 4, Obama will be the next President. That has to be a good thing.