Comments on Doubting the Vote

You know, in Canada they have a national election in 30 days - start to finish - and use pencils and paper ballots with an accuracy rate NONE of our states have EVER matched.

Of course, they have only one type of ballot, not 2000 different types.

Makes you wonder ...

Same thing in Australia, where everyone is required to vote, anyone can vote *anywhere* in a country basically the size of the US, and most places use pencil and paper with a more complex transferrable-vote system. The elections run just fine.

The key is that the Aussie election is federally run with consistent processes across the country. The fact that every county does something different here is just a recipe for disaster.

I hope a huge chunk of Obama's $700 million has been set aside for election fraud legal fees.

wow. i didn't catch that article. I live and vote in Jacksonville, and the early voting lines have been insane. i've been volunteering with a voting rights group, making sure that everything goes correctly. the problem is that once the voting sheet goes into the optical scanner, there is really no way to verify the results. i certainly hope, and think, that the votes are being counted correctly, but it's difficult to explain that to a person who has lived with bigotry and division their entire lives.

We can run Powerball lotteries every week and never screw up the results. We can easily run elections properly.

Elections in this country have always been designed to discount the vote of the poor without totally snuffing the democratic myth.

Obama probably needs 4 million extra votes to overcome the election rigging and win the popular vote.

You gotta love all this coverage of election "worries" that make it sound like the problems are purely due to inefficiency or some other innocuous cause. If the voting "problems" in Florida, Ohio and other swing states were just caused by an antiquated patchwork system then one would expect to see errors distributed more or less randomly, favoring neither party. That is most certainly not the case. The NYT article makes it sounds like Florida blacks are just fretting and worrying, not like they are legitimately concerned after a long history of systematic disenfranchisement.

This might be the election where Americans of all walks finally wake up to the fact that their votes are not being counted. Whatever the outcome, electoral reform is called for, and real reform this time, not Bush's "Help America Vote Act."

If the voting "problems" in Florida, Ohio and other swing states were just caused by an antiquated patchwork system then one would expect to see errors distributed more or less randomly

Not necessarily. Poorer counties have less money to spend updating their equipment, so I think you'd still see discrepancies in more Democratic-leaning districts. But the discrepancies we've seen over the past decade are far too widespread for that excuse to work.

I voted in St. John's county in 2000, the county south of Duval. Even though I live 3,000 miles away now, the memories of all of that are what is giving me such major election anxiety right now.

@7: I see your point, but let me point to another example from my home state, Ohio. A Federal court ruled a decade ago that the discrepancies in the educational quality in differing school districts within the state was symptomatic of systematic discrimination and must be corrected. Essentially they said that allowing the distribution of tax funds to follow regional disparities in income amounted to deliberate neglect of poorer regions. There was also a demonstrable racial element to the differences in educational opportunities offered under this funding system. It amounted to a de facto discriminatory educational system. (This pattern emerged following the "white flight" from the cities in the wake of forced desegregation in the 70's.)

If that's true for schools, it's true for voting machines. If it's known that it's easier for rich people to vote than poor people and no steps are taken to correct this, it amounts to de facto discrimination.

@9 You are correct, flamingbanjo, for that is just the amount of time I have lived in this sorry-ass state, and guess what? The school funding formulas STILL haven't changed despite the ruling.

What hope does that hold out for meaningful voting reform?