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piranhai'm eyeing washington state's governor race, which now looks like the democrat, gregoire, has "won" -- by the "decisive" number of 130 out of 2.9 million votes. it all started with the republican, rossi, being ahead by 261 votes. a machine recount reduced that lead to 42. then the hand recount had grigoire 10 votes (!!!) ahead. finally 732 absentee ballots appear that weren't tallied earlier because of scanning mistakes by election workers, woops.
so now we'll get to see how the republicans handle themselves when they're the ones with the notion that the election was "stolen" (though the republican on the election board has discounted fraud). they're already through the roof about the found absentee ballots (which the WA supreme court has said should be counted). apparently in republicans' minds "recount" means counting only the ones not counted before, not actually counting all the damn votes that can possibly be legitimately counted. thanks for clearing that little semantic issue up for me. in florida the republicans were making a lot of noises about how the democrats were such sore losers, what with their demands for recounts, and assessing hanging chads and that, and how democracy had run its course and they should just move forward. i was saying then (and it was certainly not an innovative jump to conclusions) that in the same situation, the republicans would wheel out their biggest lawyers just the same, and argue until the cows come home. *ding*. hypocritical shrubwads, that whole lot.
and this is just the highest-up SNAFU. in ohio, where i was wondering on election night how come people were still standing in line 5 or 6 hours after the polls officially should have closed, there was apparently a shortage of voting machines, and disproportionately so in democratic precincts. in north carolina a machine lost 4,438 votes and the margin of victory in the race is half that. provisional ballots caused confusions in many places. and these are just some of the irregularities; there are many more.
how americans can trust their election procedures after what all has come to light about how badly they work in many places, and how many votes are thrown out, i don't know. "every vote counts" seems to be a bunch of lipservice without the determination and professionalism to back it up. and instead of making the process more accountable, there are now places going to machines without a paper trail whatsoever. it makes my head spin. i don't get it at all. so much was uncovered in 2000 about how dysfunctionally voting was handled and yet here we are, 4 years later, and it's the same old crap all over again. i guess the 2002 act to help america vote didn't do anywhere near enough.
if y'all haven't read about this yet, this here google news link will pull up what's been written.
so now we'll get to see how the republicans handle themselves when they're the ones with the notion that the election was "stolen" (though the republican on the election board has discounted fraud). they're already through the roof about the found absentee ballots (which the WA supreme court has said should be counted). apparently in republicans' minds "recount" means counting only the ones not counted before, not actually counting all the damn votes that can possibly be legitimately counted. thanks for clearing that little semantic issue up for me. in florida the republicans were making a lot of noises about how the democrats were such sore losers, what with their demands for recounts, and assessing hanging chads and that, and how democracy had run its course and they should just move forward. i was saying then (and it was certainly not an innovative jump to conclusions) that in the same situation, the republicans would wheel out their biggest lawyers just the same, and argue until the cows come home. *ding*. hypocritical shrubwads, that whole lot.
and this is just the highest-up SNAFU. in ohio, where i was wondering on election night how come people were still standing in line 5 or 6 hours after the polls officially should have closed, there was apparently a shortage of voting machines, and disproportionately so in democratic precincts. in north carolina a machine lost 4,438 votes and the margin of victory in the race is half that. provisional ballots caused confusions in many places. and these are just some of the irregularities; there are many more.
how americans can trust their election procedures after what all has come to light about how badly they work in many places, and how many votes are thrown out, i don't know. "every vote counts" seems to be a bunch of lipservice without the determination and professionalism to back it up. and instead of making the process more accountable, there are now places going to machines without a paper trail whatsoever. it makes my head spin. i don't get it at all. so much was uncovered in 2000 about how dysfunctionally voting was handled and yet here we are, 4 years later, and it's the same old crap all over again. i guess the 2002 act to help america vote didn't do anywhere near enough.
if y'all haven't read about this yet, this here google news link will pull up what's been written.
no subject
on 2004-12-24 17:54 (UTC)Somehow the shrubwads managed to establish the meme that the problem with the 2000 election was not in who won, but in not getting the answer quickly. They convinced a lot of people that the goal of improving the elections is to have a final result by the 11 o'clock news on Tuesday. If the people actually had brains, they would insist on paper ballots physically placed in locked boxes by the voters and counted by hand by citizens. But that doesn't use any exciting technology, it doesn't make any money for any politically connected businessmen, and it means that the results won't be known until the morning after the election, and of course those things are important to our society and having the candidate preferred by the majority of the eligible voters win isn't important at all.
no subject
on 2004-12-24 18:10 (UTC)The Stalin quote rings loudly in my head every two years. Fraud or not, elections are in the hands of the people who count the vote. I long for the day when we can have fool- and fraud- proof electronic voting -- maybe with retina scanning?
Up the Revolution.
Love.
no subject
on 2004-12-24 20:49 (UTC)How to make elections better
on 2004-12-24 22:00 (UTC)verifiedvoting.org, under the general principal that even if I can't figure out the right thing to do or find the time to do something specific, I can at least financially support the organizations that are trying to figure something out.
From what I've read, verifiedvoting.org seem to have limited and specific objectives that will make a concrete difference, which makes me hopeful that they'll get their proposals passed.