November 11, 2000
Sunday, October 17, 2004, 02:13 PM
NYT front page headline: "Bush and Advisers, Confident of a Victory in Recount, Urge Gore Not to Stand in Way".

The headline covers two separate articles, one on GOP strategy and one on Gore's camp. Some excerpts:

"According to several Republican officials, the Bush campaign was considering the possibility of seeking a legal injunction against manual recounts requested by the Gore campaign that were set to begin in several Florida counties, and Mr. Bush had given Mr. Baker permission to take that step. But campaign officials had not reached a decision late tonight."

And

"For all their threats of court action and dire warnings about illegal ballots, Democratic strategists said today that the last place they wanted the presidential election to wind up was before a judge."

They, too, had phone lines for voters to call in case of trouble. Here's what happened in Palm Beach:

"Bob Weisman, the Palm Beach County chief administrator, said that the county had set up several telephone lines to help voters, but some were unstaffed on Election Day. He said that the county set up 28 telephone lines to help voters and precinct workers calling in with questions, but hired only 34 people to operate them.
'There were telephone lines, but no one to answer them,' said Mr. Weisman, a registered Republican.
At the same time, some precinct workers said that they were under strict instructions to turn away people asking for voting assistance -- mainly out of fear that it would slow down the voting. Louise Austin, a precinct worker in Boynton Beach, said she and other workers at her precinct turned away voters who beseiged them with questions.
'People were coming up to me,' Ms. Austin said, 'and I had to follow the directive -- "Don't help anyone. Don't talk to anyone." ' "

This year we are so paranoid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrealistic that all of the domains with the name "votewatch" are taken. Maybe that's what all of the folks who don't vote can do this year: go to the polls and watch those who do. Of course, that presumes that people successfully register in the first place.


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Never fall asleep listening to the radio
Sunday, October 17, 2004, 01:42 PM
Now if only I could take my own advice.

Last night I fell asleep listening to a broadcast of "Frontline: Choice 2004". What a mistake! When I woke up, I couldn't tell if I had a nightmare about the conversation with Bush and Robison or not. Am I the last person to know about this?

I've otherwise been out of the loop for a couple of days,. so there will be four postings today to make up for yesterday.

And btw I have absolute proof that Bush was *not* wearing a transmitter during the debates. See for yourself!


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November 10, 2000
Friday, October 15, 2004, 11:30 PM
NYT Headlines: "President Could Be Picked Without Florida". Good thing too, considering the mess we have this year with the hurricanes taking away mailboxes so that folks can't get their absentee ballots!

Also, "Close Vote Uncovered Flaws, Experts Say". The lead paragraph:

"The controversy swirling over Florida ballots in the still-uresolved presidential election has drawn back the curtain on what election experts have long been saying: that the American voting system is no system at all."

On Novebmber 10th, a county-by-county recount of the vote in Florida was underway, to be completed by Tuesday, Nov. 15th. They were supposed to have been done the night of the 10th, according to a request by Florida's Secretary of State, Kathleen Harris, but some counties weren't able to finish by that deadline.

Meanwhile, "in Austin, Nashville and Tallahassee, the two sides accused each other of politicizing the Florida situation..."

Well, we're certainly above that this year, aren't we, boys and girls? Glad to hear it!

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Voter Registration -- Cheap, Fast...
Friday, October 15, 2004, 10:43 PM
I went down to the Alameda County courthouse today to change my voter registration, so that I'd be able to vote in Oakland, where I now live, instead of in Alameda, where I moved to by crap shoot when I left Montreal.

In the software industry we have a saying: cheap, fast, or good, choose two. That is, you can have a piece of software developed cheap and fast, or fast and good, or good and cheap, but not all three.

So back to the voter registration. It was fast: 5 minutes, and 4 of those minutes were me waiting for the woman at the window to dig up the little voter guide and sample ballot booklets. It was cheap, in fact, free to me. So was it good? Or will I wind up at the polling place being given one of those provisional ballots which are discarded about 95% of the time, or which only list the statewide and national races, as they do in a number of places?

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November 9, 2000
Thursday, October 14, 2004, 10:54 PM
It was like having an upchuck-in-your-bed-cause-you-can't-make-it-to-the-toilet hangover for the second day in a row. We woke up to the unbelievable: no one knew who won. Here's the headline of the day: "Bush Barely Ahead of Gore in Florida as Recount Holds Key to the Election".

Best phone conversation excerpt:

"Mr. Bush told Mr. Gore that his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, had just assured him that FLorida was his, according to Gore aides.

'Let me explain something,' Mr. Gore said. 'Your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this.' "

This year, it seems that the CEO of Diebold is the ultimate authority.

An editorial by Akhil Reed Amar called for the abolition of the electoral college. Here we are, four years later, with the same bad system, oh, except that now we have deployed many more electronic voting machines where a recount becomes nigh on impossible.

It had been over a century since the last time that no one knew who one for over a day after the polls closed. Perhaps this will become the new trend: election by lawsuit, to be determined sometime in late December. It could be worse. It could be election at gunpoint...


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