Slashdot Mirror
Election Dirty Tricks About To Begin
An anonymous reader writes "ABC is warning that dirty election tricks are about to start. In the past, they've ranged from late-night robo-calls to voter intimidation. ABC has a pretty good list of what to watch out for as told by Allen Raymond, a former Republican operative, who was reformed after spending three months in prison in 2006 for pulling some of the stunts he now helps to prevent." To make this story timely, last week someone broke into a McCain campaign office in Missouri and stole a laptop computer containing "strategic information" about the local campaign.
Back in February I watched the first of two pre-election debates between the leaders of the two major parties in Spain. It was a different system: the time was divided among a few major policy areas, each of those slots was divided into a series of short alternating time slots for the two candidates, and the role of the moderator was solely to govern the clock.
The wrangling over the details went into the week before the debate, and covered items such as the style and colour of the decor. In the actual debate itself, both candidates asked direct questions and neither answered them. In the newspapers the next day, the opinions as to the winner of the debate fell entirely along the lines you would have predicted in advance from knowledge of the papers' political leanings.
So it's not just your political process which is a joke. It's just a universal truth: politicians want people to see only their good side and their opponents' bad sides.