From the Mailbag: This Week
By Horatius Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (16) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I received this email today from a good friend who is back from Iraq and learning himself an advanced degree before going back to fight in our nation’s war against terror. After a tough week of GOP losses, it provided a good hardy laugh.
Its amazing how well those voting machines worked this time. In fact I haven't heard about one controversy. Was any inner city group denied their right to vote? none? Wow, after all the controversy over the last, what 4 elections, suddenly the voting system is running better than my bowels after a bran muffin, some prunes, and a large coffee from dunkins... funny how that works.
Maybe I'm just tired, but that cracked me up. On a more discouraging note, he too expressed dismay about losing Rumsfeld. My guess is that as we observe our nation's veterans this weekend, he is not the only member of our armed forces who will.
« Today is worthy of celebration — Comments (7) | Congrats — Comments (11) »
From the Mailbag: This Week 16 Comments (0 topical, 16 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
He was referring to the lack of protest on the part of democrats and a lack of endless litigation on their part. The surmise is that democrats do not care about democracy functioning correctly, just winning. The Republicans as usual showed a measure of respect for the electoral process.
Somehow I think you may have known this.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/10/21363/611
I think the Kos Kids still will make a stink about it from time to time, what will be interesting is if the Democratic Congress tries to do anything about it.
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Thomas Jefferson
Every day in America, over one million automobiles are out of service for one reason or another. They broke down; they need their transmissions replaced; a rock cracked open the windshield.
We need to get rid of all these machines, not just the voting machines. There isn't a single kind of machine that works flawlessly, every time. Machines suck.
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
Sure, there were complaints and lawsuits during the voting, but once the Democrats found out they won, it was all as smooth as can be.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
when they could have been fleecing widows, chasing ambulances, suing Big Tobacco [on behalf of some guy who smoked two packs a day for forty years & swallowed the warning label when done], and other such useful tasks.
Just a mild suggestion of paronoia, that victory equals honesty, defeat equals dishonesty and no, democrats would never debase our electoral system just so they could raise taxes.
It's still possible that the NY Times will thunder out some imprecations against an unfair system, like wanting to know who's actually voting, cue, Racism! But if they don't the whole six year farce will blow away.
Too late to help Ken Blackwell however, evil mastermind of no less than 120, 000 stolen votes. Or so the instant legend went.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
No doubt the Center for Consitutional Rights will be able to use them.
--
Bipartisanship = give + take. Republicans give. Democrats take.
The four most important things I was involved in?
1. Training Democratic poll workers in how to explain to voters how the new electronic voting machines worked.
2. Making sure that the hand-written tally of voters reflected the number of votes registered by the new electronic machines.
3. Enforcing a court order that barred unknown parties from distributing disclaimer-free "sample ballots" which claimed that the Democratic governor had endorsed a Republican slate in the county.
4. Helping people who were not listed on the rolls determine whether they had the right to cast a ballot -- on the machines, provisionally or not at all.
Any problems?
And now that you've got some free time, will you be working on an investigation of voter fraud organized and carried out on a national scale by ACORN?
_______________________________
If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?
These are investigations being done by prosecutors' offices and not by private counsel, and I look forward to seeing the results.
The problem, as I understand it, occurs whenever there's a financial incentive to boost one's numbers regardless of the merits -- one sees it all the time with Green petition drives.
is a law-enforcement problem now maybe the 5000 'civic minded' Democrat lawyers could join with the Republican lawyers in an investigation of illegal registration and voting by dead people, illegal aliens, felons, et al and create proposals for proper registration and voter identification laws designed to actually protect the integrity of the vote?
Seems like that would be a valuable civic service on the part of the legal profession, certainly of greater civic value than running ads for Mesothelioma and Vioxx lawsuits*. If we had your aid in those areas we wouldn't be faced with all the other cr*p every two years.
I guess not, huh?
-----------
* Our motto: Mesothelioma is a serious medical matter and it requires serious legal advice
John
--------
Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.
... Jean-François Revel
FL-13: Katherine Harris' old district, the second-closest congressional race this cycle. In in the congressional race, 18,000 fewer people voted than in other races. The GOP candidate is up by a few hundred votes, and a recount is underway. Did 18,000 voters really decide to skip the congressional race?
CO: New "vote centers" were supposed to streamline the voting process, as voters were no longer bound to specific precincts. In reality, vote centers had a shortage of machines and poorly trained staffs, leading to hour-plus waits to fill out a lengthy ballot that required an average of 15 minutes to complete.
Seems like many of these problems would be addressed by rolling out national, standardized voting procedures. The way things stand, methodology for vote tabulation varies from county to county, and the process is managed by political operatives who have a vested interest in the outcome.
Looks kinda banana-republic-y to me.
Yep. As a few others stated, there were still plenty of problems.
I don't trust those things as far as I could throw em.
It's been proven over and over again how unreliable and easy they are to cheat on.
This can easily go both ways... just depends on which pollworkers get to take the machines home.
It seems like the problems and hanky-panky this time around didn't take into account the full amount of indies and repubs that turned out for the dems.
There was still the new trick of vote-flipping along with the same old dirty tricks to skew the numbers but it wasn't enough to overcome the totals.
So long as there's any questions about our election integrity we all need to take it seriously enough to demand change from the boobs we sent to washington.
We're the greatest democracy on earth and we need to keep that title no matter who you voted for.
Our troops aren't gonna let us down anywhere in the world so we damn sure better not let them down here at home.
Any assertion that voting machines didn't cause problems on 11/7 is demonstrably false:
Voting Machines Cause Chaos
Blending of voting machines slows tally process
Disparities point to machines
IDs, balky machines trip some voters
Electronic voting machines falter
There are scores of stories detailing problems with voting machines, if you only take the time to look. FYI, these glitches occurred in races where Republicans and Democrats won.