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Absentee Ballots Go Missing in Florida
RonnyJ writes "The BBC is reporting that 58,000 ballot papers have gone missing in Broward County, Florida. A police investigation has 'not uncovered any sign of criminal wrongdoing', however, the US postal service has said it is highly unlikely for 58,000 pieces of mail to just disappear. In 2000, Broward County gave Al Gore his biggest margin among Florida counties, winning 67% of the votes there."
i, for one, welcome our absentee ballet overloads.
Sounds like Jebbie's doing a good job this year too!
Maybe the Iraqi's looted them. On the other hand its probably Bill Clintons fault.
I'm sure that those ballots not being sent out was just a precaution to ensure that those who were voting absentee aren't going to vote Nader.
Seriously, though, I'd like to see a break out of voting irregularities by county nation wide. That is, count the number of bona fide complaints such as missing ballots, dropped voters, etc. and post the results by county. Why by county? Because, in a majority of states the counties run the election. To what purpose? Well, once you have such irregularities mapped, then you can see which party (Dems. or Reps.) is more prone to these problems.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
as they would of voted for Kerry anyway. :p
Is that the finger pointing begins before the facts have even been established. It's not clear whether this is an innocent mistake, but already voices are raised and accusations are being levelled. This may be nice for news corporations, but this is meant to be a calm and adult, and above all, very important process that should be treated with more seriousness. Perhaps dirty tricks are involved in the missing ballots. More likely they are not.
The serious point is that it debases the whole debate: look at the explosives question for example. A serious error may have been made, in the inadequate securing of high explosives placed under seal by the IAEE. Kerry immediately accuses Bush of failure to correctly secure them. But the information isn't at all clear cut, the explosives may in fact have already been moved, there are conflicting reports. From the initial hasty accusations, you have Bush aides furiously spinning a defense based on lies, then suddenly Kerry aides furiously spinning a defense of their candidates position. Somewhere in all the kerfluffle, the truth is lost, people become apathetic, and an important issue is trivialised, made "old news" and drops off the radar.
The fact is, candidates nowadays are so eager not to miss an opportunity to win a few points that the "news hysteria" near to election reaches fever pitch.
America needs a publicly funded TV and Newspaper source dedicated to impartiality like we have the Guardian and the BBC. The Guardian recently had an outreach program to get UK readers to help educate voters about how the world percieves America, to give them some perspective that is missing from their weekly digest. Unfortunately the campaign was DDOS and filibustered out of existence by republicans spinning a "foreign interference" false call to arms, but while it was ongoing I felt it did useful work and contributed myself. I hope I get an answer!
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
I suppose if one canditate wins by over 58,000 votes, then it won't really matter.
Chances of that are slim, though.
And either way, if I was one of those 58,000 people, I'd be pretty livid right now. And more so if the other canditate was elected in that county.
T.
that the strongest correlation is with median income and not political affiliation?
Here we learn that in democratic dictatorships you need to dis-enfranchise only a few people and not an entire nation.
Something the east could have done well to learn - and with Putin wanting to make direct appointments - maybe they have now?
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
"Meanwhile, the US postal service inspectorate said it was highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail had just disappeared."
Having heard this kind of thing before, I managed to fish out a couple references from the newsgroups:
1 and 2.
Anyway, our county clerk is strongly partisian and has pulled questionably legal stunts before, so I have planned to vote in person to reduce the chances of voting fraud.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I don't care if the votes are mostly for Democrats or Republicans - no partisans on either side should ever be able to get away with this sort of thing (assuming the votes were intentionally 'misplaced').
I plan to vote for Badnarik this year, mainly because I live in Georgia, a state Bush is pretty much guaranteed to win. If it looked close, I'd be voting for Bush. If there were no Libertarian candidate on the ballot here, I'd vote for Bush. Given that it's a certainty that either Bush or Kerry will win the Presidency, I'd rather have Bush - though the choice between the two of them is akin to the choice between having a root canal without anesthesia and having my toenails pulled out with pliers. Even though one could say I'm rooting for Bush, I want him to win fair and square, not through cheating.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
you are wrong. while /.'s reputation for wrong headlines is quite strong, it is not the case this time.
As the story poster, I did actually read the article, and saw the very first line of the article, which states the following:
Tens of thousands of postal ballots have gone missing in the US state of Florida
Sounds like the UN will have to send in independant Elections Inspectors. Its always a pity when developing countires can't hold their own elections properly :).
Rich
This is just more of the same.
When will this nonsense end? Remember the days where it didn't matter so much who was president? I mean sure, you liked one guy better than the other, but if you lost it wasn't the end of the world. I long for those days. When politics existed, but in general everything just worked. But now through combination of media and other factors everything is about ten times worse. I just want to go back to the days when I don't have to worry about government so much. I'm a computer programmer, I want to spend my time thinking about software and gizmos and things without worrying about people dying, lying, cheating, stealing and taking away civil liberties. So let's do our best to get back to those days.
Oh, and anyone who wants to make a joke about those days not ever existing, I present to you the 90's when the internet and technology was more important that politics. And that's just example 1.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
No, what the article says is that 60,000 ballots were sent out to the voters, "However, only 2,000 of them have been delivered." (article quote) -- as in only 2,000 of the 60,000 recipients actually got them.
Noplace in the article does it even suggest what you claim.
Remember that the ballots need to be postmarked by election day. Delays in their delivery is basically the same as denying them of their vote.
And you're right, there is no way the post office would lose that many letters. Which leads me to this next article quote: "Meanwhile, the US postal service inspectorate said it was highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail had just disappeared. A spokesman said inspectors were trying to establish whether the ballots were ever delivered to the postal service."
So there is a possibility that the 58,000 "missing" ballots never even made it to the post office in the first place, so they are investigating that. If this proves to be the case, someone's in a lot of trouble. If there is proof that all 60k ballots were delivered to the post office, then there will have to be more investigation as to how they didn't get to their destination. (And someone will STILL be in a lot of trouble, because the post office isn't prone to simply "misplacing" letters by the tens of thousands...)
=Smidge=
This is exactly what you could expect in any third-world banana republic: A rigged election to make it look like you have a democratic society when the real decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms.
How ya like dat?
During the 2000 election, Irving Schlossberg was found with a voting machine in the trunk of his car. He was not charged, as per Theresa LaPore, the head of elections for Palm Beach County. Oh, and both were Democrats.
Link to story on ABC's site
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
From the article: "Some 60,000 absentee ballots were despatched by authorities in Broward County, north of Miami, this month. However, only 2,000 of them have been delivered."
Delivered, not returned. Note the HUGE FREAKING DIFFERENCE. Why do you lie? What's in it for you? Especially such an obvious and easy to see through lie, since everyone can see in the FIRST PARAGRAPH that what you posted is blatantly untrue?
digitect>>There is no way the post office is going to loose 58,000 pieces of individually mailed letters, all which happen to be ballots.
Yeah, which means someone else probably did it. Now, lets see... who has a vested interest in and history of suppressing votes in florida... rrr.... reee.... repuh.... republi.... republicaaa... (note: the completion of this word is left as an excersize to anyone with at least one functioning brain cell).
digitect>> This is yet another case of Slashdot maliciously pumping false headlines and summaries to generate controversy (and thereby, hits) again.
Dude, you changed the wording of the story, then you attack slashdot for reporting something false. I think that digitect is clearly trolling.
digitect>>Would everybody please stop reading "Politics:" topics so we can get back to Nerd stuff please?
Oh, yeah, I'm going to turn my back on politics on the eve of debatably the most important election ever, because you don't like the light reality casts on a certain state or party. Don't like the truth? Try honesty. It's better than booze or church, and it's 100% compatible with reality!
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
This story isn't even listed in the main section on the default homepage, so to see it there, you need to specifically alter your profile to see all Politics stories.
So, my advice is, if you don't want to read Politics topics, don't view the section :)
anything in the 97th percentile isn't an accident.
And choosing between Kerry or Bush is really more like a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
The days when Jefferson's opponents accused him of planning to undermine every form of morality?
The days when Lincoln was accused of having sired bastards?
The days when, who was it, Adams?, was accused of procuring women for the Russian Tsar?
The days when fist fights were breaking out on the floor of Congress?
The days when candidates were being accused of insanity? Senility? Stupidity?
American elections have always been nasty.
Clear, Dark Skies
Let's see, Clinton was accused of sexual harrassment, rape, corruption, firing innocent civil servants to install his own cronies and the murder of one of his own staff members - and that was during his first term in office.
Clear, Dark Skies
That it's the Democrats who control Broward county, and all its absentee ballots - so when you look around for who to blame, "Darth Rove" isn't an option.
Clear, Dark Skies
Yeah, which means someone else probably did it. Now, lets see... who has a vested interest in and history of suppressing votes in florida... rrr.... reee.... repuh.... republi.... republicaaa... (note: the completion of this word is left as an excersize to anyone with at least one functioning brain cell).
Those of us with at least one functioning brain cell still subscribe to the idea that there should probably be some form of proof before we go pinning the blame on any one person or person(s). So far all that's stated is 58,000 votes haven't arrived to people. Possibilities:
1) Massive conspiracy of a level impossible to operate without someone finding out and blowing the whistle.
2) Error on behalf of election board or post office.
The BBC claims that only 2000 of the ballots were delivered - but it gives no evidence of this.
Certainly there are a lot of people complaining, so presumably some number have not been delivered. But how do we know that that's true of all of them? It's quite possible that the vast majority simply have not been returned yet and this is just another trick to cast doubt on the election process.
Clear, Dark Skies
You betray your Libertarian principles with this statement.
Forget for the moment how much you may dislike Kerry, even pretend that he is the WORST person in the entire world. For the purposes of this election, he is STILL a more Libertarian choice than Bush.
Bush, with the current Congress, is *effective*. They are pushing an agenda, including their view of religion, and are effective at doing so. If Kerry were to win, he would have to work with a hostile House, if not Senate, too. There isn't much he can do that can directly cross what Congress wants to let him do. In particular, with this Congress there'll be no much-feared single-insurer health care (regardless of merit, which I won't pretend to fully understand, and I don't believe anyone in the US can, without truly understanding how things work in other countries, and most of us do a poor job of that) or any of the other more controversial plans.
So you have two choices...
Another Bush presidency with a Republican Congress, effectively pushing an Agenda... (do you know the whole agenda, and how much of it do you agree with?)
A Kerry presidency with a Republican Congress, effectively gridlocked, doing only what MUST be done.
Seems to me that the latter is more Libertarian.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...and Know Nothing* Republicans were squawkin' about the U.S. being above needing international election observers. WTF Ever...
-l
* in the historical sense of the phrase.
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The Know Nothings were a totally different party, rabidly anti-immigrant and anti-catholic with a random secret club. Since we're speaking in the historical sense....
Are you under the impression those ballots are delivered individually to the post office? Think of it as about 11 xerox boxes. It could be an honest mistake, in which case they should just be tossed into the angry mob. I mean Christ all they can claim is, "Our error rate isn't likely to be much worse than 97%." But it could certainly be something else without being a grand conspiracy.
But it's not that conspiracies don't exist. Look at Clinton, impeached for lying about a blowjob that occured two decades after a debacle of a land deal that was being investigated. And look at Bush's administration revealing identities of CIA agents tasked with stoping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and lying all over the place resulting in American deaths.
Let's see. Who has the capability to snarf up a bunch of ballots. The County Election Supervisor? In case you were wondering, her name is Brenda C. Snipes. Oddly enough, she's a Democrat.
Who else could do it? One of her employess, perhaps. Not sure how that could actually happen, since it is unlikely that the Eelection Supervisor's office would hand 58,000 envelopes to their gopher and say "drop these at the Post Office on your way home, will you?". If only because 58,000 absentee ballots probably weighs in at 5+ tons. So, likely enough the Post Office picks the stuff up from the Office.
Now, the USPS guy who picked it up could be a Republican who is stupid enough to believe he can "lose" 5 tons of mail without anyone noticing. It's not terribly likely, given the amount of noise being made about voting irregularities these days, but it is possible.
Oddly enough, the article mentions a police investigation, which, so far, "has not uncovered any evidence of criminal wrongdoing."
Won't it be funny if this reduces down to Ms. Snipes saying "Oops! We told the USPS it was the pallet in Warehouse 2, when it was actually the pallet in Warehouse 1 they should have picked up. My bad"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It doesn't need to be a "massive conspiracy". 58,000 ballots could be misaddressed purposely with a few keystrokes, or a few mailbins could be left in a storage room. Easy enough if it all happens at the source. As for no one "finding out"... there's an article on BBC. Clearly someone did find out. We're into *duh* territory here.
>>2) Error on behalf of election board or post office.
Which the post office themself says is highly unlikely. RTFA.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Yes, it looks like the Democratic Party's operatives have screwed up again.
Check it out: the "butterfly ballot"? A Democrat County Clerk designed it. Broward County? Heavily Democrat, county government controlled by Democrats.
Hell of a scam: screw up as much as you want -- just blame it on the Republicans.
(The draft? Charlie Rangel (D) proposes it -- and they're still flogging the notion that it's Bush planning for a draft.)
They had goofey secret clubs, and they were admonished that when they were asked about the "nativist" activities they should say they "know nothing." So they did, and their mantra became their name.
Could it be the milatary vote, hence more likly to be for Bush. So is this the Rebublicans stealing the votes so they can loss, or is it the Democrates stealling them so they can win at all cost?
Just out of curiosity, how does anyone know how many have been delivered? Granted, my absentee ballot is from California, but there did not seem to be any reciept confrimation or anything. I hate to be skeptical, but perhaps the 2,000 number comes from how many completed absentee ballots have made it back to the election officials, and they are assuming that everyone who gets an absentee should have returned it complete by now. Maybe the other 58,000 just haven't voted yet, or have voted and it is just in the mail on the way back to the election officials.
I guess my point is, do we even know something has happened yet?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Wikipedia agrees with you but disagrees with what I learned in school which is that it was connected to the use of the phrase "know nothing". -l
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Anyone who has access to the materials. You don't have to be the boss to have access.
>>Who else could do it? One of her employess, perhaps. Not sure how that could actually happen, since it is unlikely that the Eelection Supervisor's office would hand 58,000 envelopes to their gopher and say "drop these at the Post Office on your way home, will you?".
Yeah, I'm sure that they don't use employees to move the ballots... probably magic or alien transported technology. Much more likely than sending out a truck.
>> If only because 58,000 absentee ballots probably weighs in at 5+ tons.
5.8 pounds per ballot? Not likely. hey, I can make shit up too. I choose to live in reality instead. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree since you clearly insist on believing whatever's convenient enough to let you dismiss anything and everything you don't like hearing.
>>Won't it be funny if this reduces down to Ms. Snipes saying "Oops! We told the USPS it was the pallet in Warehouse 2, when it was actually the pallet in Warehouse 1 they should have picked up. My bad"?
Won't it be funny if this reduces down to the police investigation eventually fingering a hard core republican with mislabeling a few bins or just not calling the post office? Sure, it'd be funny. But your speculation and my speculation aren't important. The police will continue their investigation. If you don't like it, you can lump it.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
They're resending the ballots, check it out.
Right here
"In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve." -Winston Churchill
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In the US the candidates need to come up with quite a lot of money to have a chance of winning - no money = very low chance of winning.
More often than not the money comes from lobbyists/corporates. So out of a large number of Republicans and Democrats, the corporates can just pick the few Democrats AND Republicans that will do what they want. So it doesn't matter as much to them which side wins - as long as it's their candidate who wins.
It's like a magician giving you a hand of cards to pick from. The cards have already been picked!
Members of Congress
Can't handle that division stuff to well, can you? 5.8 ballots per pound is more correct. that's about 2.75 ounces per ballot, for those who can handle the math. About three times as heavy as a First Class Stamp will move through the system. When you consider the size of a ballot, plus the envelope for returning it, plus the envelope for delivering it, I don't find that too out to lunch.
I haven't dismissed anything. I have merely looked at the evidence. Of which there is very little. Let's see:
1) ~58,000 ballots are not accounted for.
2) USPS Inspectorate says they couldn't be lost by accident. Note that he doesn't really know, but he thinks it couldn't happen that way. Given that a few years ago the USPS found an 18-wheeler parked under a bridge up north packed with mail that hadn't been delivered for 18 years, I wonder.
3) The Election Commissioner doesn't know anything about it. Or claims not to. I have no reason to doubt her, but we must consider the possibility. NOTE: New Orleans had a local election just after Ivan passed by. The Election Commissioner (she's not called that, but that's what she does) totally screwed the election up - didn't deliver voting machines on time, things like that. She blamed the storm, even though the election held the same day six miles away had no problems. So I have recent experience of the effects of a less thancompetent Elections Commissioner on an election.
That's about it, really. Police say no evidence of wrongdoing. Noone has come forward to admit to anything, even incompetence. No leads reported. No political Parties implicated. Nada, zilch, zip.
You, on the other hand, seem to believe that this must, by definition, be a Republican plot. As you believe that everything that happens is a Republican plot. Your evidence that this is so, if you please. And evidence is what I want to see, not suggestions that this could only be a Republican plot because the County is 2/3 Dem. It's just as likely (given that it is a plot) that the voters being disnfranchised were the 1/3 Republicans in the County, pending some actual information.
Interestingly, it would be pretty easy to get the information. The Election Commissioner has to have a list of people who have requested Absentee Ballots, and a list of those to whom Absentee Ballots were sent (otherwise, how could she know that 58,000 were missing, and 2000 were sent?). Cross-check the lists against Party affiliations, and look for patterns, and voila, you suddenly have an "indication of criminal wrongdoing", if say, the Republican ballots were sent, and the Democrat ballots were not sent. Or vice versa.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm not against electronic voting because it is electronic, I am against it because there is no paper trail. But there is no paper trail for paper voting either! Seriously: Do you get a receipt? Do you get a cryptographic hash of your vote? Or the ID number for your ballot? Can you call the election commission on the following day and verify that ballot 12345 was received and has hash 0A57F2? If not -- then you can be sure of nothing.
Without this type of validation, a ballot can be lost and nobody knows. Electronic voting gives us the possibility of implementing truly modern methods for eliminating this problem. Granted, it could be done on paper too -- but nobody wants to reform the paper system.
No, we don't know what's going on, it's typical hype. One story clearly says "some voters have completed and returned ballots mailed those days, hundreds of others have called to complain their forms have not arrived. It was unclear how many absentee ballots were affected."
Basically, they've got a few back, and people have called and complained about not getting them. This could either mean there is a problem or... there isn't. Whoopdeedo. There's nothing to indicate if this isn't just a ploy by an organized group to try and cast extra ballots for that matter.
Someone needs to stop reading and posting BBC tabloid stories on Slashdot.
Again, if you RTFA - the people who were expecting the ballots in the mail are calling the election officials with complaints that they didn't get them. That's how you know something is up.
It's quite clear that it's not a case of 2000 ballots being received back by the election office. It's a case of only 2000 people who asked for a ballot actually getting one. If you received your ballot and sent it back, you wouldn't be calling the officials about it because you'ld think everything was hunky-dory. But if you asked for a ballot two weeks ago and didn't get one, you'ld probably give them a call and ask why.
I'd imagine that once they receive a few hundred/few thousand of these calls over the past weeks, that's when the investigation starts. Then they determine that only about 2,000 out of 60,000 people who asked for a ballot actually got one.
=Smidge=
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Hanlon's Razor
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Can i use this for my sig? i need a new one and this one is gold.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
And I wish there was a mod category of "stupid".
Liberty.
I don't argue with what you say.
I'll just say two things:
1: The Republicans aren't likely to lose the neocons until the neocons start costing them enough elections to HURT. There'll be no salvage until then.
2: Regardless of any plans, the *combination* of Kerry plus Congress will be more conservative than Bush plus Congress. Congress will act as a loony-filter on Kerry's plans, and Kerry will act as a loony-filter on the neocons in Congress.
I didn't like Bush back in 2000, but at the time it felt to me that he had been "annointed" to run for the Republicans. At the time, I didn't know who had annointed him, and that fact plus the mere annointment itself were enough to turn me away.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Here Here let's not bother questioning what were fed by politicians etc. and we should all stop looking at independent news and believe only those who show partisanship to our favourite party.
shame on whoever posted this story for highlighting a possible election problem it's not as if it's important.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Here is the deal:
Four years ago, every American learned that there are problems with how votes are tallied in the United States.
We have had four years to come up with a replacement.
In four years, the powers-that-be *have not come up with an acceptable replacement*.
*That* is the problem - there are huge problems remaining with the voting system in America (in addition to the huge problems that have been put into place with some of the replacement system put into place since 2000).
Both Democrats and Republicans have begun planning for the legal battle that will ensue after the November election. What they will not tell you is that not only is it their fault (meaning both parties) that there are still problems, but that they have a vested interest in making sure the problems are not fixed.
It seems that the two parties would rather the election be decided in the courts after the election than by the actual voters.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I'm not sure how this is a pro-Bush point. Leaving aside the merit of the justification for the Iraq war, though the initial execution of the war was well done, the rest of the job (after Mission Accomplished) has certainly been a debacle. I'd not give Bush a good grade on this, as Commander in Chief.
As for how Kerry could do better or worse, first off normally the War Powers Act limits what the President can do with the troops before going to Congress. Normally, that is. Congress surrendered that right to the President, for Iraq. In an earlier draft the "for Iraq" was missing, giving the President cart blanche with the troops. I don't see a Republican-controlled Congress giving Kerry that same capability, with or without that limit. Nor has Kerry said he would do a bug-out on Iraq, so I don't see that as a problem. Nor has he made aggressive statements, with the possible exception of additional troops to Afghanistan to pursue Taliban/Al Quaeda, and with that I agree.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Someone else said the Republican party is more "salvagable" then the Democrats, and if only they'd get rid of the neocons...
My response... Ain't gonna happen, at least not until the neocons start losing elections for the Republicans, and make it HURT.
So I still say, the combination of a President Kerry and a Republican Congress is more conservative than Bush with that same Congress.
I'll also add that if you want to reform the Republican party, and get the neocons (and their religious throat-shoving) out, start at the Top. In this respect, a vote for Kerry is better for the traditional Republican party.
I was raised Republican. I am currently Independent, with Contrarian leanings. My brother holds that the current Republican party has deserted the Republican virtues we were raised with.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"the counties run the election... once you have such irregularities mapped, then you can see which party (Dems. or Reps.) is more prone to these problems."
Prima facie, it would prove nothing.
One can argue that the controlling party is responsible, if the disenfranchised voters are mostly of the other party.
OTOH, one can argue that one (or a few) individual(s) of the NON-controlling party is responsible, if THEIR foes are the disenfranchised.
OTOOH, one can argue that EITHER side was responsible for doing a botched job and non-selectively suppressing their own voters.
And having been this way for the entire history of our country, how is anyone surprised that election fraud is commonplace?
I won't believe that I live in a representative democracy until I can verify that my vote was counted.
As for no one "finding out"... there's an article on BBC. Clearly someone did find out. We're into *duh* territory here.
No. What has been "found out" is that 58,000 ballots are missing. What has not been "found out" is the reason for the missing ballots. However, you seem to be another of the type of person who prefers to just jump right to a conclusion without one iota of evidence present to support it.
Which the post office themself says is highly unlikely.
Highly unlikely but not impossible. I mean, directly from your response:
a few mailbins could be left in a storage room
Hrm... Post Offices have both mailbins and storage rooms, don't they?
What does that have to do with disappearing absentee ballots?
Clear, Dark Skies
Well, I did RTFA and I don't doubt that there are people who have not gotten their ballots. The article never says where the 2,000 number comes from. Are these completed ballots or did the election officials call all 60,000 people and ask if they received their ballots or have 58,000 people independently phoned in complaints. The later two possibilities are not feasible.
It's quite clear that it's not a case of 2000 ballots being received back by the election office. It's a case of only 2000 people who asked for a ballot actually getting one.
Your reading comprehsion must be much better than mine... where in the article does it say where the 2,000 number came from?
I am not saying that this does not merit investigtion... I am just saying that we don't even know the scope of the problem and that this article is woefully inadequate on the facts. I will even consider that maybe the ballots were never mailed... but the post office is saying they never received them. This could be an honest mistake on the part of the election office. Bottom line, we need more facts before we can start blaming any one party or claiming this is a dirty trick.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
you know, I should forward all my nigerian scam mail to you. After all, I have no motive for tricking you.
Oh, out of curiousity: Are you actually claiming that no one in Europe cares if Bush is re-elected?
Clear, Dark Skies
Pure electronic voting cannot provide this audit trail. Only a combined paper/electronic system is able to match it.
I am in a county that had been using mechanical voting machines prior to the electronic machines. Tell me how we had any form of paper trail whith them. Also, you can always do a write in vote and submit it on PAPER. If you don't like the electronic machines do that instead.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
the article talks about "hundreds" of complaints - not 58,000 of them.
Clear, Dark Skies
From the article:
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Yahoo posted this story a few days back:
1 5&e=2&u=/nm/20041027/pl_nm/campaign_florida_dc
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=6
I wouldn't mind seeing a bench-clearing brawl. It might help clarify things for the next election.
Clear, Dark Skies
I was in the navy for almost five years, and overseas at the time of the 1996 presidential elections. It usually took five to seven (often longer) days for mail to get back to my family at home and the same time to get to me -- if my ship was in port when the mail arrived.
The article cited said that Broward county officials were overnighting the ballots to folks outside of the county. The way the military mail system works you've got regional post offices (APO/FPO) through which all the military mail flows. Getting the ballots to them *today* does nothing to expedite them the rest of the way to the service members, and certainly does nothing for the return trip.
The point is, because there is such a delay in getting mail to/from military members, there is absolutely no way that resending absentee ballots now will allow them to be returned by the deadline (which is Tuesday in most jurisdictions). When you figure that the military tends to vote heavily republican, sending out the ballots late is good enough for a "soft kill" of a net gain of thousands of republican votes.
While this should be a national outrage -- denying the vote to the very men and women who continue to guarantee our rights, frequently with their own blood -- I expect this story will get its cursory day or two of coverage before getting buried under other stories and nobody will ever be tried for this, much less see the inside of a jail cell.
This story is nowhere to be found on the USA mainstream news web sites (cnn, abc, m$nbc, etc.).
Has anybody else noticed this?
Normally I would attribute the original story to the tinfoil-hat crowd, but this is on BBC (a news outlet that I respect).
Does this bother anyone else as much as it bothers me???
"Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority." - Dr. Who
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
You are talking about My fellow non-Americans, a large happening completely silenced by the US media, even by Slashdot. I have submitted the story about this happening to politics.slashdot.org twice, on 18 and 19 October 2004, and in fact I was not the only person who has done it, but, needless to say, it got rejected every single time, for some reason, even though there were nearly no new stories on politics.slashdot.org posted during those days. It is actually quite an interesting story, certainly worth reposting at least as a comment. Here is the first sory I posted:
Unfortunately, it got rej
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
My anger is at a peak. I can bearly type coherrently. NO FIX IN 2004! If our votes don't count, American freedom is finished. Its time to take to the streets win or loss.
"the people who were expecting the ballots in the mail are calling the election officials with complaints that they didn't get them."
How do you know they didn't get them? How do I know that? How does anybody know that?
It could be a planned Democrat ploy to let their absenteee voters vote TWICE.
I wonder if the Democrats who run the county are playing by the rules when somebody says they didn't receive a ballot. The law says that if you don't receive your absentee ballot in the mail, you have to go down to your local courthouse and sign an affidavit stating that you didn't.
Somehow I seriously doubt that Floriduh Dems are following (or even want to follow) the law. Just stating my opinion based on their past illegal activities.