Category Archives: Politics: US

One more reason polls don't matter: people who think they are registered to vote may not be. In Nevada, a GOP-financed firm purported to register voters, but secretly ripped up the forms submitted by people who wanted to register as Democrats.

There are dirty tricks in every election, but this is down there among the slimiest. Thousands of would-be voters may be effected. And it's not the only such story from this electoral cycle. See this voter fraud roundup and the one at Angry Bear.

The US doesn't have a great history on this subject, and I don't mean just the 2000 election. There's substantial evidence, for example, that JFK, LBJ and then-Mayor Daley stole the 1960 election by stuffing ballot boxes in Texas and rigging the vote in Chicago…mitigated only somewaht by some counter-evidence of GOP vote fraud that year. Arguably, Nixon's finest hour was taking that defeat relatively quietly; the counter-argument is he knew what skeletons were in his closet. (You know, this lot makes me miss Nixon. At least when Nixon and Kissinger committed a war crime, they had a somewhat plausible theory motivating it.)

This year, however, the reported evidence of fraud — not to mention the potential for rigging voting machines — leans very heavily one way, and suggests a pattern of voter intimidation (aimed at Blacks and Native Americans) and outright fraud that may continue on to election day.

How many fraud stories leaning the same way, in how many states, does it take before the validity of this election is so much in doubt that we need to ask if we still have a democracy in the real sense of the word?

And if we should conclude that we have failed Benjamin Franklin's test — a Republic, if you can keep it — then what do we do? The mind boggles. One wants to think about something else. Novels. Getting out the vote. The new Chumbawumba CDs that arrived in the mail. Work.

Is it best not to think about it until we know the result of the election? (Even if some Republicans are already laying plans to claim, as they did with Clinton, that only Republicans can be legitimately elected?) After all, it might not be close, and blowout one way would quiet criticism, espeically if it wasn't the party in power that had access to the paperless electronic voting machines.

Or, perhaps, is it already too late in the game?

Updates: Kos1 and Kos2

Remember when everyone was all worked up about 'apathy'?

It's not news that 'freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one'. And even in this Internet age of 'everyone a publisher' the fact remains that TV remains the dominant media form in the US, and much of the world.

Sinclair media's decision to abuse its ownership of a group of stations to air a low-quality anti-Kerry propaganda film a few days before the election — to order the stations to dump network programming and run junk instead — is a classic abuse of power.

What's interesting is how Internet users are fighting back. Some, like Ernest Miller, are writing about the context — how the current regulatory climate lacks the safeguards that used to prevent such a blatant abuse of power.

Others are concentrating on how to fight back. One set of ideas comes via Kevin Hayden, suggesting a national pushback aimed at Sinclair's national advertisers. This is a good strategy if you don't live in one of the affected communities.

Another method appears via Kevin Drum, and emphasizes the local angle. I think it's a winner.

• Eric Muller explains the sloppy mendacity reflected on the cover of Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment”. It seems you can judge a book by its cover.
• NYT discovers the absentee ballot fraud problem that I've been worrying about for weeks. As of the latest Jeb Bush revisions of the voting law, Florida has fewer safeguards against fraud of anywhere (see the chart) — and a great propensity towards it.
• WashPo on bad decision making in Iraq. And yes, the fish does rot from the head.
• How the Pentagon reports Iraq 'casualties' — it's much, much less than the number of soldiers actually hurt
• CBS document discourse has split into parallel universes. In one universe the claims the documents are modern creations are obviously bogus, while in the other universe they are proved. I was leaning towards suspicious until Safire weighed in with a typically bombastic and tactical column. It's usually a safe bet those sorts of column are wrong, so I'm leaning towards genuine again.