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Flaw in Florida E-Voting Machines
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like there are more problems with the new e-voting machines. How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?"
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What scares me about all of this is that four years after the last election, it is still not common knowledge that Florida purged thousands of people from the electoral role illegally. This was admitted by Choicepoint in a special congressional hearing. Why Jeb Bush is still Governor in Florida I'll never know. (Notice that I'm saying nothing about the hanging chads business, that's a different kettle fish altogether).
What really amazes me though is that it's happening again and no-one is doing a thing! Why in god's name doesnt the media in your country do it's job? I'm absolutely amazed that you're allowing this to happen again.
Gambling on Voting (NY Times Op-Ed today)
I don't understand this run on machines anyway, don't paper ballots scale perfectly? Counting votes can be arbitrarily parallelized after all.
I remember those recount stories back when they happened in mid-2001. On both CNN and listening the next day on NPR I heard and read that the recount showed Gore won Florida. Oh sure, when they only recounted those counties Gore was asking to be recounted, Bush still was ahead by 300 votes -- and that's what made all the headlines. But when they recounted ALL the counties in Florida, Gore was ahead. For some reason, that didn't make headlines but was buried about 2/3 the way down the CNN story. Yet it was the most significant fact of all: The voters of Florida picked Gore, thereby making him win both the popular vote and the electoral vote.
By then, of course, it was too late to do much, and would be a real mess to try to fix, so that's probably why the news got buried. But many of us noted those facts at the time and we haven't forgotten, no matter how many misinformed people still think Bush won by 300 votes.
I'm not going to get in the middle of you two but I think the Carlysle meeting between Bush and Bin Laden's brother referred to was with George H.W. Bush, his father, and not George W. Bush. Before you start ranting maybe you should figure out what you are talking about.
I'm not sure there was a meeting on the day of 9/11 but George H.W. Bush does work for the Carlyle group so its plausible. He gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for making short speeches for them, or more likely to use his influence to steer business their way. The Carlyle group is one of Saudi Arabia's largest defense contractors. The Bin Laden family is one of the Saudi Arabia's wealthier and more powerful families. Osama is the black sheep of the family, and they publicly disowned him, but Saudi Arabians deny a lot of ties to terrorism though they are the world's biggest supporters and funders of most of it. The Bin Laden family had to disown Osama or it would hammer their multibillion dollar business in the U.S. and the rest of the world. They run a big construction conglomerate if I recall. Whether they really disowned him is anybody's guess.
George W. Bush did allow a special flight right after 9/11, when no American's were flying, in which all the Bin Laden relatives and numerous other Saudi's were spirited out of the country.
Halliburton for Cheney and Carlysle for the Bush family are two of the many incestuous relationships in the current government which make it look very corrupt, whether it really is or not.
@de_machina
{I am related to an appellate lawyer, so I have some clue as to what I'm talking about in the following.} That is simply an incorrect reading of the Supreme Court's ruling (available here). The way the relationship goes between state and federal courts is that the state's highest court (in this case, the Florida Supreme Court) is the final authority on the interpretation of state law, for which federal courts have no jurisdiction. SCOTUS can intervene only when, by the Supremacy Clause, federal law or the US Constitution contradicts the state court's decision.
The justification for the SCOTUS decision of Bush vs Gore in Bush's favor was on the theory that since there was no universal standard of counting votes, voters in Florida were not recieving equal protection under the law, violating the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court never contradicted the Florida Supreme Court's interpretation of Florida law, because they have no power to do so.
I am officially gone from