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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'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
that the strongest correlation is with median income and not political affiliation?
"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.
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?
1. 58,000 ballots is a lot of paper. More than a ton of it. It's hard to lose that much stuff, it takes inventiveness and effort. The other way to look at it is what's the error rate. Typical, but not inspiring, for such a process would be about 1 in a million, and there aren't 58 billion people, and certainly not that many absentee voters.
2. On your random change of topic. You'd think in a war to find and secure Weapons of Mass destruction (and between Rice, Cheney, and Bush all scaring up the specter of a "mushroom cloud" I think I'm not being too petty in holding them to that) that one of the directives would be to secure and destroy the componants. And according to the US army unit commander the facility was locked down when they were there on April 10th. They left it as is, as they weren't ordered to do anything with it. The Iraqi's noted it had been looted some months later.
3. Public Funding. It's called PBS. Frontline is a great show. The problem is, there's not enough conflict and it doesn't move fast enough. When you work a 60 hour week and commute an hour each way 6 days a week, you get your news in little bites before you collapse from fatigue, and fill in the rest with talk radio, and chatter at work. The republicans have figured out how to make politics salacious, entertaining, and clipped in to short segments for people who are busy in a way people sitting in an airconditioned office aren't, and they own the stations to distribute it.
As for what you think of us. And I don't mean to be rude, hell if you're lost in Seattle, I'll give you directions as exhaustive as you need, or if the circumstances merit it, probably a lift, but we only care what the world thinks of us in so far as image has a certain utility. Beyond that, we realize we're fascinating and all, but can't you tend to your own damn garden? What might be difficult for you to appreciate, even with as much as I strongly disagree with so much my president has done, I know what fucking team I play for. And if the image war can't be won, fuck it, black hats all around. What you should really concern yourselves with is the Democrats who don't care that the war was wrong beyond it being an internal problem that we should solve. When it comes to US foriegn policy in the middle east, to quote Denis Leary, two words: Nuclear Fucking Weapons.
I'm a upper middle class white guy living in *Seattle*, don't think I can't make my peace with genocide. The last time it came up really wasn't *that* long ago.
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
One thing that concerns me is that, although the BBC website had this story on their front page this morning (~4 hours ago), at the time of posting I can't see a single trace of it on a couple of American-based sites, such as CNN.com (or Fox 'News'), not even under the 'Election' coverage sections.
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.
So you're saying I should take the a column based entirely on speculation over the word of a US army unit commander? Uh, no. While Russia might have moved some Iraqi arms into Syria (and why the fuck they would do this given their own terrorisms problems is completely beyond the scope of reason), these they didn't.
And that the administration didn't develope a plan to secure and neutralize componants of the supposed weapons programs at the very least calls attention to their small talent planning and evaluating plans. Just the way the Bush's administration found out about and subsequently handled this development is indictment enough.