Thursday, November 11, 2004

So whaddya think? Was the vote fixed?

Color me a conspiracy theorist, but I say the vote was tampered with in certain places. The reach of power in this country is broad and deep. I think it is entirely credible that not only were eligible voters disenfranchised but that the actual votes were manipulated-- especially in the case of electronic voting machines.

Scuttlebutt over mistmatches between exit polls and results are commonplace; of course, they're often anecdotal or misquoted-- or even fabricated. In a cynical society such as ours, there will always be complainers, whether legitimate or spurious.

Nevertheless, I'd like to see any one of the counties in question in Florida-- the ones where vast differences between registrations and/or exit polls and the final results were reliably reported as greatest-- volunteer for a sort of informal "system check." Willing voters (given the bizarre statistics in some of those counties, there should be more than a few volunteers) should organize for a recount of their own. Without "election officials" to assist or interfere, they should create a simple system to allow willing participants to "report" the vote they made on election day. It would be a kind of poll, I suppose, which, in the end, may have little significance, but it's an opportunity to get the scoop from the horse's mouth, as it were-- from the voters themselves. DID they actually vote the way the election officials SAID they voted? Only they can tell us.

I suggest a technologically simple system: perhaps every participant could be given a penny to drop into an appropriate jar: one jar for Bush, one for Kerry. Then run the coins through a coin counter (available in some grocery stores these days) and a tally could thereby be reached quickly and easily.

How would you prevent multiple vote-casting? I don't know. I don't know how to create the system, but I think the experiment would be very enlightening.

What do you think?

Monday, November 08, 2004

Find Your Quadrant

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Beyond left, right and center ... beyond "red" and "blue" ... this multidimensional graph will show you where you really stand. Algy, I'll be curious to know where you end up, if you take the test!

Tess