Election stories
The UK’s Guardian has a good one - Day of reckoning that could shape US politics for years
There’s an interesting graph at the end:
If the Democrats fail to take either chamber of Congress in the current disgruntled climate, the president will avoid a constitutional battle, but it would undoubtedly spark questioning of America’s credentials as an effective representative democracy.
“There is no precedent in American history in these conditions for the party of government not to get a shellacking [a pounding],” argued Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. “It would raise questions over the capacity for democratic accountability of the American system.”
No precedent. That will make for some interesting spin if the Dems don’t take the House. I just voted on a Diebold machine here in Kent, Ohio and have little faith that my votes were necessarily accurately recorded. This story from ABC News gets into why:
Who’s Counting: Hacking Diebold Voting Machines - November 7, 2006
New Evidence About Viral Memory Cards
In a paper last month, “Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,” (available at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/) Princeton computer professor Edward W. Felten and two graduate students Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman discussed a common Diebold machine. They showed that anyone who gets access to the machine and its memory card for literally a minute or two could easily install the group’s invisible vote-stealing software on the machine. (Poll workers and others have unsupervised access for much longer periods.) Changing all logs, counters, and associated records to reflect the bogus vote count that it generates, the software installed by the infected memory card (similar to a floppy disk) would be undetectable. In fact, the software would delete itself at the end of Election Day.
I give ABC credit for running this story today, but they should have been sounding alarms before now. If the mainstream media were truly responsible about their watchdog duty, they would be running bold headlines about how private corporations with ties to the Republican Party own and operate 80 percent of the voting machines that will be used across America today.
Another bad sign for the Dems is that I was able to walk right in to my polling place today (just off campus from Kent State University) and vote with no waiting. Two years ago, I had to wait in line for two hours… not the turnout Dems need here in Ohio where a close election probably won’t cut it for U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown. He needs to win by at least 5 points to prevent a potential theft…
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