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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."
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
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.
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
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.
Always a pretty sight, blaming the victim. Perhaps in fairness you should mention the RNC funded organizations in four of the swing states who are under FBI investigation pretending to be DNC funded organizations to obtain and shred Democratic voter registrations. Don't hear much about that in the news. Or perhaps the voter list that Republican operatives are using in Ohio to challenge valid voters which just happens to contain 87% democrats and 72% african americans, even though the population is pretty evenly split. Don't hear that much about that in the news either. People who say that "the media" is liberal make me want to hurl.
http://james.nontrivial.org