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Politics Government

Absentee Ballots Go Missing in Florida 205

Posted by michael from the dog-ate-em dept.
RonnyJ writes "The BBC is reporting that 58,000 ballot papers have gone missing in Broward County, Florida. A police investigation has 'not uncovered any sign of criminal wrongdoing', however, the US postal service has said it is highly unlikely for 58,000 pieces of mail to just disappear. In 2000, Broward County gave Al Gore his biggest margin among Florida counties, winning 67% of the votes there."
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Absentee Ballots Go Missing in Florida More

Absentee Ballots Go Missing in Florida

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  • missing huh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Choroisothiazolinone ( 779859 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:05AM (#10652045)
    Maybe the Iraqi's looted them. On the other hand its probably Bill Clintons fault.

  • Just a Precaution . . . (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dausha ( 546002 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:09AM (#10652071) Homepage
    I'm sure that those ballots not being sent out was just a precaution to ensure that those who were voting absentee aren't going to vote Nader.

    Seriously, though, I'd like to see a break out of voting irregularities by county nation wide. That is, count the number of bona fide complaints such as missing ballots, dropped voters, etc. and post the results by county. Why by county? Because, in a majority of states the counties run the election. To what purpose? Well, once you have such irregularities mapped, then you can see which party (Dems. or Reps.) is more prone to these problems.

    • What do you want to bet... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      that the strongest correlation is with median income and not political affiliation?
    • "I'd like to see a break out of voting irregularities by county nation wide" Done. At least for a lot of them: http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Voter_Registra tion_Fraud_Clearinghouse

    • Re:Just a Precaution . . . (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Otter ( 3800 )
      Well, once you have such irregularities mapped, then you can see which party (Dems. or Reps.) is more prone to these problems.

      This gets at what I think is the real issue:

      The real problem in Florida in 2000 was huge rates of ballot spoilage in overwhelmingly Democratic, mostly black counties run by overwhelmingly Democratic, mostly black politicians. (Due to a combination of outdated equipment, inexperienced voters and plain incompetence.) _That_ is the problem that needed to be solved, but due to a combina

      • Re:Just a Precaution . . . (Score:5, Informative)

        by nontrivial ( 222436 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @10:45AM (#10653427) Homepage
        Always a pretty sight, blaming the victim. Perhaps in fairness you should mention the RNC funded organizations in four of the swing states who are under FBI investigation pretending to be DNC funded organizations to obtain and shred Democratic voter registrations. Don't hear much about that in the news. Or perhaps the voter list that Republican operatives are using in Ohio to challenge valid voters which just happens to contain 87% democrats and 72% african americans, even though the population is pretty evenly split. Don't hear that much about that in the news either. People who say that "the media" is liberal make me want to hurl.
        • And one could point at the DNC paying a woman caught voting for dead people in southd Dakota where Dashill (sp?) is fighting for his life.

          But to do this (and to do what you are doing) proves the OP's point. People are much quicker to point out how the other guys is worse / your guy is better, than address the actual structural problems with the system..

    • "the counties run the election... once you have such irregularities mapped, then you can see which party (Dems. or Reps.) is more prone to these problems."

      Prima facie, it would prove nothing.
      One can argue that the controlling party is responsible, if the disenfranchised voters are mostly of the other party.
      OTOH, one can argue that one (or a few) individual(s) of the NON-controlling party is responsible, if THEIR foes are the disenfranchised.
      OTOOH, one can argue that EITHER side was responsible for doing a

  • The trouble with the American Political Process (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SimianOverlord ( 727643 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:09AM (#10652073) Homepage Journal
    Is that the finger pointing begins before the facts have even been established. It's not clear whether this is an innocent mistake, but already voices are raised and accusations are being levelled. This may be nice for news corporations, but this is meant to be a calm and adult, and above all, very important process that should be treated with more seriousness. Perhaps dirty tricks are involved in the missing ballots. More likely they are not.

    The serious point is that it debases the whole debate: look at the explosives question for example. A serious error may have been made, in the inadequate securing of high explosives placed under seal by the IAEE. Kerry immediately accuses Bush of failure to correctly secure them. But the information isn't at all clear cut, the explosives may in fact have already been moved, there are conflicting reports. From the initial hasty accusations, you have Bush aides furiously spinning a defense based on lies, then suddenly Kerry aides furiously spinning a defense of their candidates position. Somewhere in all the kerfluffle, the truth is lost, people become apathetic, and an important issue is trivialised, made "old news" and drops off the radar.

    The fact is, candidates nowadays are so eager not to miss an opportunity to win a few points that the "news hysteria" near to election reaches fever pitch.

    America needs a publicly funded TV and Newspaper source dedicated to impartiality like we have the Guardian and the BBC. The Guardian recently had an outreach program to get UK readers to help educate voters about how the world percieves America, to give them some perspective that is missing from their weekly digest. Unfortunately the campaign was DDOS and filibustered out of existence by republicans spinning a "foreign interference" false call to arms, but while it was ongoing I felt it did useful work and contributed myself. I hope I get an answer!

    • Re:The trouble with the American Political Process (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:43AM (#10652269)
      1. 58,000 ballots is a lot of paper. More than a ton of it. It's hard to lose that much stuff, it takes inventiveness and effort. The other way to look at it is what's the error rate. Typical, but not inspiring, for such a process would be about 1 in a million, and there aren't 58 billion people, and certainly not that many absentee voters.

      2. On your random change of topic. You'd think in a war to find and secure Weapons of Mass destruction (and between Rice, Cheney, and Bush all scaring up the specter of a "mushroom cloud" I think I'm not being too petty in holding them to that) that one of the directives would be to secure and destroy the componants. And according to the US army unit commander the facility was locked down when they were there on April 10th. They left it as is, as they weren't ordered to do anything with it. The Iraqi's noted it had been looted some months later.

      3. Public Funding. It's called PBS. Frontline is a great show. The problem is, there's not enough conflict and it doesn't move fast enough. When you work a 60 hour week and commute an hour each way 6 days a week, you get your news in little bites before you collapse from fatigue, and fill in the rest with talk radio, and chatter at work. The republicans have figured out how to make politics salacious, entertaining, and clipped in to short segments for people who are busy in a way people sitting in an airconditioned office aren't, and they own the stations to distribute it.

      As for what you think of us. And I don't mean to be rude, hell if you're lost in Seattle, I'll give you directions as exhaustive as you need, or if the circumstances merit it, probably a lift, but we only care what the world thinks of us in so far as image has a certain utility. Beyond that, we realize we're fascinating and all, but can't you tend to your own damn garden? What might be difficult for you to appreciate, even with as much as I strongly disagree with so much my president has done, I know what fucking team I play for. And if the image war can't be won, fuck it, black hats all around. What you should really concern yourselves with is the Democrats who don't care that the war was wrong beyond it being an internal problem that we should solve. When it comes to US foriegn policy in the middle east, to quote Denis Leary, two words: Nuclear Fucking Weapons.

      I'm a upper middle class white guy living in *Seattle*, don't think I can't make my peace with genocide. The last time it came up really wasn't *that* long ago.

    • Re:The trouble with the American Political Process (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RonnyJ ( 651856 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:58AM (#10652363)
      One thing that concerns me is that, although the BBC website had this story on their front page this morning (~4 hours ago), at the time of posting I can't see a single trace of it on a couple of American-based sites, such as CNN.com (or Fox 'News'), not even under the 'Election' coverage sections.
      • That's because it was all over the CNN television network all afternoon yesterday (EST). The absentee ballots that are missing, were not filled out. They were blank, and they became missing en-route to the voters' homes. Most of the voters ended up standing in line to vote, however; there's little doubt that something dubious is happening here. Moreover, at least some of these people will be disenfranchised as a result of never receving their ballots - most likely elderly people.

    • dedicated to impartiality like we have the Guardian and the BBC

      The BBC is certainly supposed to be impartial (though its right-wing detractors claim that BBC stands for Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation...!), but the Guardian - and I say this as a former long-time reader - is an unashamedly left-of-centre paper. Until recently it openly supported the Labour Party, only switching allegiance to the Liberal Democrats a few days ago because it regards the Labour Government as too right-wing.

      Not intending

      • This isn't how impartiality works...
        You don't look at the party choices that are out there, categorize them one dimensionally from left to right and then see where the center is.
        You should as a requirement ignore party lines. In fact I'm with Ralph Nader I think the whole political party system is B.S. and should be scrapped.
    • Didn't the Guardian call for the assassination [bbc.co.uk] of the United States' President? I agree with most of what you said, but the Guardian is not a good example. I don't think a US news outlet has ever called for the assassination of a British or European leader.

      • Re:The trouble with the American Political Process (Score:4, Informative)

        by I confirm I'm not a ( 720413 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @11:15AM (#10653787) Journal

        Didn't the Guardian call for the assassination of the United States' President?

        Nope! A writer in the Guardian jokingly asked where John Wilkes Booth was when we needed him. I seriously doubt the Guardian editorial team want Bush assassinated. I mean, I'd be happy if he wasn't President but I appreciate the instability an assassination would cause.

        The Guardian, by the way, isn't a tabloid, but it does have a tabloid section ("G2") which has lighter, often humerous stories and articles (I'm presuming that this is where the comment you refer to was made). Neither the main section nor G2 tend to be read by people who'd take the John Wilkes Booth comment seriously; Guardian readers write letters to the editor, they don't take up arms against foreign heads-of-state - they're much to lower-upper-middle-class for that ;)

    • Well said. As much as I'd like to believe this is a Bush conspiracy, I'd be hard-pressed to believe that they'd think they could get away with 'losing' 58,000 ballots intentionally. 2,000, sure, but not 58,000.

      I agree on your other point of needing an independant news service, but what would be the point? The news services that exist already should be independant and unbiased, so already you're dealing with an addition to a flawed system.

      The problem is not with lack of media reporting, it's with people wh
  • I suppose if one canditate wins by over 58,000 votes, then it won't really matter.

    Chances of that are slim, though.

    And either way, if I was one of those 58,000 people, I'd be pretty livid right now. And more so if the other canditate was elected in that county.

    T.
    • the entire state is up in arms about things like this. 4 years and 9-billion dollars associated to voting reform have only made things worse.

      its a crock of shit and i hope people take the law into their own hands about it. no one else will fix it for them.

  • democratic dictatorships (Score:4, Informative)

    by samjam ( 256347 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:16AM (#10652109) Homepage Journal
    Here we learn that in democratic dictatorships you need to dis-enfranchise only a few people and not an entire nation.

    Something the east could have done well to learn - and with Putin wanting to make direct appointments - maybe they have now?

    Sam
    • Disgusting isn't it?

      How do you loose 58,000 absentee ballots???

      Oh well.. i would be happy to give the benefit of the doubt - if it wasn't for that 2000 election BS

      • Re:democratic dictatorships (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @09:25AM (#10652586) Homepage Journal
        ... i would be happy to give the benefit of the doubt - if it wasn't for that 2000 election BS

        But this is hardly anything new. If you've been paying attention in previous US elections, you'll have noticed many cases like this. Thus, in the 2000 election here in Boston, there was a news story of the discovery of 20,000 "missing" ballots in one precinct. Similar stories pop up all over. The attitude of the people running the election is basically "Oops; sorry about that." It's hard to avoid the impression of "Well, we were caught, so we'll have to count that batch."

        The obvious question is "How many others are never discovered?" Hard to tell. But when I read about blocks of thousands of ballots that were somehow "misplaced", it's hard to avoid the obvious suspicion. Is it really true that only 50% or 60% of the people actually vote? Or are 30% to 40% of the ballots "lost" and never counted?

        In Florida, they seem to be openly thumbing their noses at the voters by having so many ballots disappear. It's like they don't even need to pretend any more. They know that the worst that can happen is that they'll have to "discover" and count a few of the votes. But nobody will ever be punished for such things.
      • Note: This was outgoing blank ballots to voters not incoming. Basically a mass mailout either didn't get delivered or something, but it was all in one truck or something at one point in time.
    • Most of the states are disenfranshised because most of us dont "swing". You'd think that is such an obvious flaw, but no, it's seen as an advantage since compaign finance laws limit the amount of money to spend. If commercial products faced the same limitations as political products, we'd have 56 minutes of TV programming every hour.

      But there's a way to get back, just vote for your favorite third party candidate. If your state is projected to have a wide margin between Bush and Kerry, you only waste y
  • "Meanwhile, the US postal service inspectorate said it was highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail had just disappeared."

    Having heard this kind of thing before, I managed to fish out a couple references from the newsgroups:
    1 [google.com] and 2 [google.com].

    Anyway, our county clerk is strongly partisian and has pulled questionably legal stunts before, so I have planned to vote in person to reduce the chances of voting fraud.
    • "Meanwhile, the US postal service inspectorate said it was highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail had just disappeared."

      I think it's VERY likely that the USPS lost the stuff. I recently sent a priority mail package to my brother and it took over 3 weeks to travel 300 miles. Every single day, I get random mail that was delivered to the wrong address. Some of the addresses are even for different zip codes!!! This is not mail carrier dependant - we've had over a dozen different mail carriers over the pa

  • Inexcusable... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jlanthripp ( 244362 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:26AM (#10652165) Journal
    If these ballots were misplaced due to error or accident, the individuals responsible should be sacked. If they were 'misplaced' (wink-wink nudge-nudge) on purpose, the individuals responsible should be sacked and jailed. And regardless of whether they're ever found, this should be investigated with all zeal and vigor.

    I don't care if the votes are mostly for Democrats or Republicans - no partisans on either side should ever be able to get away with this sort of thing (assuming the votes were intentionally 'misplaced').

    I plan to vote for Badnarik this year, mainly because I live in Georgia, a state Bush is pretty much guaranteed to win. If it looked close, I'd be voting for Bush. If there were no Libertarian candidate on the ballot here, I'd vote for Bush. Given that it's a certainty that either Bush or Kerry will win the Presidency, I'd rather have Bush - though the choice between the two of them is akin to the choice between having a root canal without anesthesia and having my toenails pulled out with pliers. Even though one could say I'm rooting for Bush, I want him to win fair and square, not through cheating.

    • You betray your Libertarian principles with this statement.

      Forget for the moment how much you may dislike Kerry, even pretend that he is the WORST person in the entire world. For the purposes of this election, he is STILL a more Libertarian choice than Bush.

      Bush, with the current Congress, is *effective*. They are pushing an agenda, including their view of religion, and are effective at doing so. If Kerry were to win, he would have to work with a hostile House, if not Senate, too. There isn't much he can
      • Actually, I'm not a "Big-L" Libertarian. I'm mainly a conservative with some libertarian leanings. I do, however, think some sort of "everybody is covered" health care plan might possibly be a good thing if done right, but it'd be a very bad thing if done wrong, and I have full faith in the ability of government to do things wrong.

        You made a good point in your post, and indeed I had not fully considered that approach previously, though I had touched on it a time or two. I voted for Bush in 2000 when he w

        • If only Bush hadn't (Score:2, Insightful)

          by dpilot ( 134227 )
          Someone else said the Republican party is more "salvagable" then the Democrats, and if only they'd get rid of the neocons...

          My response... Ain't gonna happen, at least not until the neocons start losing elections for the Republicans, and make it HURT.

          So I still say, the combination of a President Kerry and a Republican Congress is more conservative than Bush with that same Congress.
          I'll also add that if you want to reform the Republican party, and get the neocons (and their religious throat-shoving) out,
      • I totally agree, but also remember that while the President has an indirect control of laws, he has a direct control of our troops.
      • Some people regard the Republicans as being more salvagable than the Democrats. That is to say: with a libertarian bent, the Republicans need to lose the neo-cons and the uber-religious right and they become much more in line with what we're looking for. The Democrats have their loony contingent as well, but their fundimental philosophies are incompatible with what I consider moral.

        Of course, like the grandparent poster, I'm in a state that has totally committed to a candidate (California, in my case, so

        • Some people regard the Republicans as being more salvagable than the Democrats. That is to say: with a libertarian bent, the Republicans need to lose the neo-cons and the uber-religious right and they become much more in line with what we're looking for.

          You hit the nail right square on the head. Many are the times that I've lamented the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the religious right. Often have I railed against the assumption by the United States of the role of Global Police.

          I'm a big

      • Forget for the moment how much you may dislike Kerry, even pretend that he is the WORST person in the entire world. For the purposes of this election, he is STILL a more Libertarian choice than Bush.

        Disclaimer: I am not voting for Bush or Kerry

        You ignore in your post (like everyone always does) the third branch of Gevernment. Kerry is far more likely to appoint people who will legislate from the bench than Bush is..

        • No, I didn't. It seemed an unnecessary complication, at the time. Since you brought it up...

          You forget confirmation by the Senate. Kerry won't be able to put in a left-wing wingnut, because the Senate won't let him. So far the large minority of Democrats in the Senate has kept the farthest right justices out of the system, too. The wild-card here is the "Nuke Option" as reported in Slashdot, a while back.

          Then we have to take up the very term, "legislate from the bench." Strange how when the justices agree
          • Then we have to take up the very term, "legislate from the bench." Strange how when the justices agree with you, they're being "strict constructionists" or "preserving the intent of the framers of the Constitution," but when they disagree with you, they're "legislating from the bench."

            Really? can you find an example of *me* doing this? Im serious where has a judge done something and *I* have said yea I agree so its ok they made up a new law.

            Again, a Bush Presidency with our Congress will likely produce

    • mainly because I live in Georgia, a state Bush is pretty much guaranteed to win. If it looked close, I'd be voting for Bush

      Based on what data? The polling data seems to be not only poorly reported, but in many cases the samples are poorly-selected (e.g., ignoring cellphone users, etc.).

      I sincerely hope that you're correct in your assumption about the spread between the two candidates in your area, but honestly... can you afford to be wrong?

      • Based on what data? The polling data seems to be not only poorly reported, but in many cases the samples are poorly-selected (e.g., ignoring cellphone users, etc.).

        I watch www.electoral-vote.com, which reports that Bush is currently ahead 57% to 40% - a comfortable lead. While it's possible that the cellphone-only people are statistically significant in numbers, they aren't likely to be numerous enough to overcome a 17% advantage in a state with a population of 8.5 million.

        I sincerely hope that you're c

    • Small world. I live in Georgia and I'm voting for Badnarik also.

  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by rjw57 ( 532004 ) * <richwareham@nOSPaM.users.sourceforge.net> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:35AM (#10652217) Homepage Journal
    Sounds like the UN will have to send in independant Elections Inspectors. Its always a pity when developing countires can't hold their own elections properly :).
    • President Jimmy was interviewed on PBS last week. He had lots of negative stuff to express including the fact that the United States doesn't meet the Carter Center's standards due to quite a few things about our lovely system.

  • More of the same (Score:3)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:39AM (#10652234) Homepage Journal
    This is just more of the same [russellbeattie.com].

    When will this nonsense end? Remember the days where it didn't matter so much who was president? I mean sure, you liked one guy better than the other, but if you lost it wasn't the end of the world. I long for those days. When politics existed, but in general everything just worked. But now through combination of media and other factors everything is about ten times worse. I just want to go back to the days when I don't have to worry about government so much. I'm a computer programmer, I want to spend my time thinking about software and gizmos and things without worrying about people dying, lying, cheating, stealing and taking away civil liberties. So let's do our best to get back to those days.

    Oh, and anyone who wants to make a joke about those days not ever existing, I present to you the 90's when the internet and technology was more important that politics. And that's just example 1.

    • When did those days exist? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by porkchop_d_clown ( 39923 ) <mwheinz@nOSpAm.me.com> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @09:03AM (#10652403)
      The days when Jefferson's opponents accused him of planning to undermine every form of morality?

      The days when Lincoln was accused of having sired bastards?

      The days when, who was it, Adams?, was accused of procuring women for the Russian Tsar?

      The days when fist fights were breaking out on the floor of Congress?

      The days when candidates were being accused of insanity? Senility? Stupidity?

      American elections have always been nasty.

  • The Banana Republic of Florida. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by macdaddy357 ( 582412 ) <macdaddy357@hotmail.com> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:42AM (#10652256)
    This is exactly what you could expect in any third-world banana republic: A rigged election to make it look like you have a democratic society when the real decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms.
    • That it's the Democrats who control Broward county, and all its absentee ballots - so when you look around for who to blame, "Darth Rove" isn't an option.
      • In the US the candidates need to come up with quite a lot of money to have a chance of winning - no money = very low chance of winning.

        More often than not the money comes from lobbyists/corporates. So out of a large number of Republicans and Democrats, the corporates can just pick the few Democrats AND Republicans that will do what they want. So it doesn't matter as much to them which side wins - as long as it's their candidate who wins.

        It's like a magician giving you a hand of cards to pick from. The car

  • Irving Schlossberg strikes again? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mbourgon ( 186257 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @08:48AM (#10652302) Homepage
    During the 2000 election, Irving Schlossberg was found with a voting machine in the trunk of his car. He was not charged, as per Theresa LaPore, the head of elections for Palm Beach County. Oh, and both were Democrats.

    Link to story on ABC's site [go.com]
  • The BBC claims that only 2000 of the ballots were delivered - but it gives no evidence of this.

    Certainly there are a lot of people complaining, so presumably some number have not been delivered. But how do we know that that's true of all of them? It's quite possible that the vast majority simply have not been returned yet and this is just another trick to cast doubt on the election process.
  • ...and Know Nothing* Republicans were squawkin' about the U.S. being above needing international election observers. WTF Ever...

    -l

    * in the historical sense of the phrase.
  • Could it be the milatary vote, hence more likly to be for Bush. So is this the Rebublicans stealing the votes so they can loss, or is it the Democrates stealling them so they can win at all cost?
  • They're resending the ballots, check it out.

    Right here [yahoo.com]

  • Electronic voting is the answer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Thursday October 28, 2004 @10:56AM (#10653553) Homepage
    I'm not against electronic voting because it is electronic, I am against it because there is no paper trail. But there is no paper trail for paper voting either! Seriously: Do you get a receipt? Do you get a cryptographic hash of your vote? Or the ID number for your ballot? Can you call the election commission on the following day and verify that ballot 12345 was received and has hash 0A57F2? If not -- then you can be sure of nothing.

    Without this type of validation, a ballot can be lost and nobody knows. Electronic voting gives us the possibility of implementing truly modern methods for eliminating this problem. Granted, it could be done on paper too -- but nobody wants to reform the paper system.
    • And having been this way for the entire history of our country, how is anyone surprised that election fraud is commonplace?
      I won't believe that I live in a representative democracy until I can verify that my vote was counted.

    • The paper trail isn't meant for the voter, it's meant for the board of elections. The machines need to print a backup paper version of the ballot in addition to the electronic version. The voter needs to see this paper backup before giving it to the people handling the election to double check that it is correct.

      It's too easy to tamper with electronic votes and not have anyone notice.

    • Okay, this one seriously needs a reply. In a good paper-based voting system, the steps will be (more or less) the following:

      1. Some time prior to voting day, you will register. You should receive a receipt for registration (in some countries it will be stamped into your national ID, for example). Usually you can only vote at the station at which you register.
      2. The voter's roll is compiled at a central location to ensure that each voter is registered for only one station.
      3. On voting day you arrive at the vo
      • Pure electronic voting cannot provide this audit trail. Only a combined paper/electronic system is able to match it.

        I am in a county that had been using mechanical voting machines prior to the electronic machines. Tell me how we had any form of paper trail whith them. Also, you can always do a write in vote and submit it on PAPER. If you don't like the electronic machines do that instead.

  • The problem... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) * <nowalmartNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday October 28, 2004 @11:32AM (#10654029) Homepage Journal
    Here is the deal:

    Four years ago, every American learned that there are problems with how votes are tallied in the United States.

    We have had four years to come up with a replacement.

    In four years, the powers-that-be *have not come up with an acceptable replacement*.

    *That* is the problem - there are huge problems remaining with the voting system in America (in addition to the huge problems that have been put into place with some of the replacement system put into place since 2000).

    Both Democrats and Republicans have begun planning for the legal battle that will ensue after the November election. What they will not tell you is that not only is it their fault (meaning both parties) that there are still problems, but that they have a vested interest in making sure the problems are not fixed.

    It seems that the two parties would rather the election be decided in the courts after the election than by the actual voters.

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