Problems with The Vote

If you're going to have problems "getting out the vote", the solution may not be to get out more voters, but to simply get out more votes.

As my LiveJournal friend ZombieFodder points out today, there are plenty of stories out there on Voter Irregularities. At least online.

The mainstream press seems to be taking a back seat on this one. Are they looking to avoid a repeat of 2000? Are they cow-towed by the OutFoxing of the Right? Were they just handed a memo that said "forget it"?

Luckily, one of my favorite newscasters, Keith Olbermann did a 15-minute piece on the subject on last night's edition of "Countdown" on MSNBC. (The "Countdown" homepage has a link to a video clip of the story.)

Let's just say that the list of voting problems is long. (Sort the list to include only the problem in your own home state. Here's what the list in NC looks like.) All in all, the types of problems being reported are enough to make me sick at the thought of our election process.

A former professor of mine once said of the media industry, "If you control the avenues of distribution, you control the industry." To paraphrase, if you control the avenues of voting, you control the election."

It's been well documented that Walden O’Dell, the chairman of the board of Diebold Election Systems, said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to [George W. Bush] in 2004.” Ohio was a known target of problems early on. That the irregularities are not being well attended to now, despite the long history of known issues, simply mystifies me.

The Slashdot story "2004 Election Weirdness Continues" has some really good items to point out:

I've read dozens of submissions about election anomolies in the last week and they show no sign of slowing so I've decided to post a few of the main ones here to let you all discuss them.

The first is the Common Dreams report that shows that optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly in florida: the Touchscreen counties roughly matched up to party registration numbers, but optically scanned paper ballot counties showed strangeness like one county where 69.3% registered democrat, but only 28% of them voted for Kerry.

Palm Beach County, Florida logged 88,000 more votes than there were voters;

that machines in LaPorte, Michigan discounted 50,000 voters;

in Columbus, Ohio voting machines gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes;

in Broward County, Florida voting machines were counting backwards;

Lastly, precincts in New Mexico gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters.

Maybe I'm just a naive idealist, but I think there should be some accountability in the voting process, some way to insure that the vote we think we're casting is actualy cast and counted as we intended it to be, and that the person we elect should be fairly elected and that the fairness in which s/he is elected be unquestionable.

Maybe at some point in my lifetime that will happen.

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