Gore Vidal Savages Electronic Voting

gribbly writes "aging author and social critic Gore Vidal savaged electronic voting in an interview with the LA Weekly. The interview deals mainly with (what's wrong with) the Bush Administration, but halfway down he says: 'We don't want an election without a paper trail...all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?'."

Comments

How much press will it get, though?

[Denyer]

Given that much of the media is similarly controlled?

Re:How much press will it get, though?

[bitrott]

The majority of political talk radio shows are on AM. There are very few FM talk radio shows that aren't also on AM. That's why people refer to AM radio as conservative radio. There are plenty of conservative media outlets out there. There's a very simple rul of thumb about this rediculously conflated issue. If you ever feel compelled to consider the bias of the media please follow The Money. Most all major media organizations are owned by conservatives. Most of them are publicly controlled companies. How many industries do you know go out of their way to confound their employers? Many press outlets are known for doing so, but not nearly as many as you think. BTW, news and media, like people, do not easily fall into your convenient liberal/conservative buckets. Most people have very complex feelings about most issues. Just like people, the media often tries to portray issues as a series of "grays". I find that the people most willing to become irrationally angry about "liberal media" are the ones that don't really understand the industry and would prefer a world perfectly in-line with their own world view. Sorry, it just doesn't work that way.

Re:How much press will it get, though?

[willtsmith]

Al Franken is a satirist. What is truly disturbing about his book is the "funny guy" does much better research than most of the news media.

Everyone has been happy to engage in personal attacks against Franken. What they haven't done is challenge his material. Why, because conservatives aren't interested in facts.

Unlike some (Bill O'Reilly) Al doesn't claim to be unbaised. I wouldn't say that his book "debunks" the myth of liberal media bias. But it does explain why it's a stupid thing to say in the first place.

The media is a business. They look out for their bottom line. I keep hearing about one poll where 80% of reporters voted for Clinton. Who gives a shit. They don't decide whats printed.

The owners and editors decide what is printed. They do what is in their own best interest. They have been a big friend to Bush since Bush has been a friend to them. The FCC de-regulation was a BIG help. Even better help was a war. WAR = Ratings!!!!!!

As you pan through the radio spectrum, you'll have a hard time finding any of those pinko liberals they love to bitch about. Search the number one news network, Fox any liberals their. Hardly. How about the major networks. The only one that hasn't sold old to being a corporate conservative shill is CBS.

The most telling fact of a liberal media myth is that real liberals HATE the media. You would think they would be pleased with the New York Times. Check out some REAL lefty liberal sites like Buzzflash.com and OpEdnews.com and my favorite DailyHowler.com. They hate the media even more than "conservatives" do.

As Al Franken said. Asking whether the media is liberal or conservative is like asking if Al Queda uses too much oil in their Hummus. The question really doesn't apply. They have their own agenda and it doesn't have SHIT to do ideology.

At the end of the day, their bias is revealed in accepting news articles written by third parties and think tanks. They don't sufficiently research their content. They go to press before they've checked their facts just to get scoops. They write stories to sell advertising.

The basic gist is that the media has lower standards for content. That is their bias, sloppy, cheap, profitable.

Re:Why oh why

[eurleif]

Also why don't most normal American's a have a problem with Bush yet?

Normal americans wouldn't have a problem with a reincarnated Hitler. As long as they have TV, plenty of food, etc. most of them will be happy.

Demand a paper trail!

[Eraserhd]

Sign the HR 2239 petition. It requires electronic machines to produce a receipt which is deposited in a lock box in case of a recount and mandates .5% of districts at random do a recount to verify accuracy of the machines.

As noted author, Gore Vidal, was ...

[burgburgburg]

led away to his Guantanamo relocation center, he was quoted as saying ...oh, wait. The Official Information Minister has informed me that reporting Vidal's final statement would make me an enemy combatant, and would mean that the terrorists had won. And that would be doubleplusungood.

Huh?

[schon]

The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with -- even using much of the same language.

Really? The PATRIOT act was written in German? :o)

no! motor voter != all drivers can vote

[ClarkEvans]

Liberals are the ones who pushed for Motor-Voter legislation and now want to give driver's licenses to illegals. Who's up to their eyeballs in corruption?

This is mixing two issues. Motor Voter is about allowing you to submit for voter registration *at* the DMV. It is not about giving the right to vote to people with drivers licenses. They are two entirely different processes. Motor Voter was a _huge_ success in increasing voter registration by making it convient for the average person.

Right. And I'm sure they were donors to the Clinton Administration as well.

From what I've been reading. O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, has been reliably quoted as saying that he will deliver states to the Republican party.
Chuck Hagel, a republican senator, was at one time (and probably still is) a part owner of Election Systems and Software (ES&S).

It does not matter if they *are* being evil, what matters is that they should not even be _close_ to voting companies. It is a clear conflict of interest and smells bad no matter how you put it. I'd go further and say that all voting machines should not be done by companies at all -- too much at risk.

This has nothing to do with conspiricy theory, it has everything to do with common sense. You lock doors of your house, not to keep bad people out, but to "keep honest people honest". Power corrupts. And these people should not be putting themselves in to places where they could be corrupted, or even give the appearance of being corrupt. Its just wrong.

Re:Why oh why

[Master of Transhuman]

The only reason 95% of Americans wouldn't like Hitler is because they KNOW about Hitler. If Hitler was starting today, he'd be Bush's campaign director, or Secretary of Defense (since he came from the military initially - and with the Iron Cross to boot).

A large number of Americans supported Hitler in the 1930's - including Prescott Bush, George's grandfather who eventually had his bank taken away from him by the US government for supporting the Nazis.

Bush is at least as much a raving rightwing religious lunatic as Hitler was (he has allegedly been found face down on the Oval Office floor praying) - and he has much more power and much less control and much less opposition in this country than Hitler did in Germany.

Finally, Bush's cronies, the neocons, are mostly neo-Troskyites. It's amusing to me that the rightwing Christian Zionists are all supporting people who follow other people who were essentially ex-Communists! It doesn't get more bizarre than this.

Vidal Opposes BushCo: +100, Patriotic

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't believe that the U.S. is a now a dictatorship and
are not operating under Plan G, after you read this, you WILL believe
the U.S. is a dictatorship and implement Plan G:


Despots in the Whitehouse :

We are the patriots

How is it possible for the US to engage in
wars without the consensus of a large part of
the American people? Gore Vidal places the
question within a historical perspective that
reveals the remarkable foresight of Benjamin
Franklin

I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that's that. We won. And those
who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity--Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against
what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.

But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last
century--and I lived through three-quarters of it--we still
held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of
Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once
believed that I would see a great part of the nation--of we
the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of
war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an
arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting
wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the
unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of
the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.

During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard.
Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam,
replied, "I had other priorities." Well, so did 12 million of us
sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to
fulfill.

So who's to blame? Us? Them? Well, we can safely blame
certain oil and gas hustlers who have effectively hijacked the
government from presidency to Congress to, most
ominously, the judiciary. How did they do it? Curiously, the
means have always been there. It took the higher greed
and other interests to make this coup d'Ttat work.

It was Benjamin Franklin, of all people, who saw our future
most clearly back in 1787, when, as a delegate to the
Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, he read for the
first time the proposed Constitution. He was old; he was
dying; he was not well enough to speak but he had
prepared a text that a friend read. It is so dark a statement
that most school history books omit his key words.

Franklin urged the convention to accept the Constitution
despite what he took to be its great faults, because it might,
he said, provide good government in the short term. "There
is no form of government but what may be a blessing to
the people if well administered, and I believe farther that
this is likely to be well administered for a course of years,
and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done
before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to
need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Think of Enron, Merrill Lynch, etc., of chads and butterfly
ballots, of Scalia's son arguing before his unrecused father
at the Supreme Court while unrecused Thomas sits silently
by, his wife already at work for the approaching Bush
Administration. Think, finally, of the electoral college, a piece
of dubious, antidemocratic machinery that Franklin
doubtless saw as a source of deepest corruption and
subsequent mischief for the Republic, as happened not only
in 1876 but in 2000.

Frankli