Post-Election Reports from Here and There

Post-Election Reports from Here and TherePosted on Thursday, November 25 @ 21:56:26 PST Topic: The Political Landscape
"Did Dubbya rig the election?" A British Labour MP asks the question. Unfortunately, this just became a subscription only article, after your first page view. Here' s an excerpt: "Michael Meacher smells something fishy in Bush's return to office. The evidence of fraud is not yet conclusive but, given the Republicans' record, it is all too plausible. The great mystery of the US presidential election was that the exit polls, which had been reliable guides in all previous elections, did not tally with the final results. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire and North Carolina, however, where electronic or optical scanning machines were used (though not exclusively), the tracking polls were seriously discrepant from the published result. Two aspects of this are immediately striking. One is the large size of the variance, and the other is that in every case it favoured Bush. Moreover, extensive voting irregularities have been reported across the US - including intimidation, exclusion of black voters from electoral rolls, touchscreens that consistently registered support for Bush when the name Kerry was touched, and a large number of county precincts (including in Ohio) where the number of votes cast exceeded the total number of registered voters, sometimes by large margins. One's immediate reaction is that such large-scale fraud is implausible. But look at the history of the Republican Party, and its willingness to go to extraordinary lengths to manipulate the popular vote, and the idea seems all too likely. It has emerged that the Diebold Gems software and optical scan voting machines used in counting a high proportion of the votes may not be tamper-proof from hacking, particularly via remote modems. Two US computer security experts, in their recently published book Black Box Voting, argue that "by entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes." "Ralph Nader-requested recount to resume Monday," in New Hampshire."What Vote Fraud?" Bev Harris, the Executive Director of Black Box Voting, tells us what's been going on since November 2nd."Jackson plans rally with ministers to call for election investigation." Jesse jumps into the fray in Ohio.