A discussion of how
this century has gotten off to such a bad start.
In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
- Thursday, November 18, 2004 -
Today's quick "election fraud" update (yes I know nothing will come of this, if anything does the Supreme Court will step in... but you know what... we have to do this, otherwise 2006, 2008, etc. all those future votes will be meaningless if we don't fight now to point out the problems)
Are there people out there who still honestly think the electronic voting machines that had no verifiable paper trail were a good idea? If so, maybe they should read this article, and after doing so maybe they should get a job that doesn't entail weakening our democracy. New statewide election possible
BEAUFORT -- Elections workers and reporters crammed themselves into a tiny storage room Tuesday and angled for their best views of a black metal box the size of a large briefcase.
And then they studied a three-word electronic message -- "Voter log full" -- that some in the room, deep down, had hoped wouldn't appear.
The warning message indicated that a computer tallying votes in coastal Carteret County had reached its limit at 3,016 electronic ballots.
If only someone had seen the same message a few weeks ago, when the votes actually mattered.
Tuesday's exercise was the latest in an investigation into an embarrassing, and possibly costly, voting problem. Because of problems with the county's voting machine, North Carolina may have to hold another statewide election to pick an agriculture commissioner.
This time it is an error that probably messed up the numbers for Republican candidates... well maybe now it will get attention.
and things are still going on in Ohio as Olbermann posts from his undisclosed location: Ohio undervotes
Yet when the votes were tallied, 168 of the 611 voters had made no choice for president. Unless these were the famed undecideds we heard so much about in the closing weeks of the campaigns, something went terribly wrong. 27 and a half percent of the voters in that “Washington X” precinct in Montgomery County officially didn’t have a presidential preference.
This was the high point of the Daily News’ investigative analysis of the still-unofficial voting results in its county— or more properly, perhaps, the low point. The paper discovered that of the 284, 650 votes in Montgomery, a total of 5,693 registered no valid vote for president. And the percentages were significantly higher in the 231 precincts that wound up voting for Kerry (2.8%) than did the 354 that wound up voting for Bush (1.6%).
Besides Washington X, a second County precinct exceeded 27% ‘undercount,’ as the election professionals, such as they are, call it. Washington X, Kettering 3-A, and five of the other top ten ‘undercount’ precincts by percentage wound up supporting Bush.
Since, as the papers note, political scientists suggested that the poor and the lesser-educated are presumed to have more trouble with punch card voting, there are several logical disconnects here. Given the outcomes in those two precincts, Washington X and Kettering 3-A, were those mostly Bush voters who managed to blank out more than a quarter of their own ballots, or did the precincts wind up voting for Bush because more than a quarter of the ballots had no valid presidential vote?
What happened in the voting precincts in Moraine, Ohio? 2,557 votes were cast at seven sites there. The President won the city by 2%. The number of ballots without a valid presidential vote was 5.6%.
What do the state undercounts in Ohio look like? Did they reduce Bush’s margin of victory? Did they eliminate votes for Kerry? What the hell happened?
The least likely explanations are that these people couldn’t make up their minds, or screwed up only the presidential part of their ballots.
And here's a story that probably would get a lot of play except that it comes from UC Berkeley, which despite being a very fine school is located in, well, Berkeley.
A research team at UC Berkeley will report that irregularities
associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded
130,000 - 260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in
Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained
discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic
voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting
methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance -- the
probability is less than 0.1 percent
This is a "team" blog. We are a bunch of
Americans, whose rising distress
in our leader's decisions brought us together to make this site.
As Bush said, he's a "uniter." Many of us have never even met.
That's the internet for you.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the
president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American people."
- Teddy Roosevelt
"Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of
its citizenship. If private cooperative endeavor fails to provide work
for willing hands and relief for the unfortunate, those suffering
hardship from no fault of their own have a right to call upon the
Government for aid; and a government worthy of its name must make
fitting response."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions, but laws must and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain
degree."
- James Madison
"I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves." - John F. Kennedy
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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