How To Lose An Election

smooth wombat writes "CNN has posted a story to their site about electronic votes from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines that were lost due to a computer crash.: 'The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.' Other groups are challenging a state rule preventing counties that use the machines from conducting manual recounts from them." Reader fatwater adds a link to the New York Times' coverage.

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Re:This is why there need to be reform

[Rei]

To clarify, push polling is the act of calling up people with an intent not to poll, but to establish a concept in a voter's mind. For example, a push poll might ask some basic poll questions, and in the middle ask "Would you be less likely to vote for Candidate A if they were convicted of child molestation"?

Probably the most famous real-world case of push poling was what Bush's campaign did to McCain in South Carolina. His campaign asked: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?". McCain was campaining with his adopted Bangladeshi daughter - having semi-dark skin, this helped convince people that the question on the poll was, in fact, an illegitimate black child.