or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
November 04, 2004
More Voting Weirdosity
Well, actually not weird. The mechanics of voting are a public service. America has always had many characteristics of a third world county, and one of those characteristics is that public services become crappier the poorer you are. Public schools for poor people are crap, libraries for poor people are crap, prisons for poor people are crap, the crap (sewage) systems for poor people are crap. And so forth.
The voting systems are probably even worse than other public services. The people in charge with the money have no incentive to provide regular public services for poor people, but they actually have a negative incentive to provide voting services. After all, the easier it is for poor people to vote, the less power the rich people have.
Greg Palast says a lot of interesting stuff about this here. His main points are:
1. 3% of ballots cast in the US are generally found to be "spoiled" and discarded. A lower percentage (just under 2%) is expected to be discarded in this election, but that's still a lot: almost two million.
2. The discarded ballots mostly come from poorer areas, because they have the worst voting equipment. In 2000, Florida discarded 180,000 ballots, of which 54% were calculated to have been cast by black voters.
3. Ohio isn't saying how many ballots were discarded this year, but in 2000 it was 1.96% of the total. A similar percentage this year would mean the votes of 110,000 Ohioans weren't counted.
4. The 110,000 ballots added to the 175,000-250,000 provisional ballots in Ohio equals 285,000-360,000 uncounted votes. Since currently counted ballots in Ohio give Bush a lead of 136,483, Kerry would have to get 69-75% of the uncounted votes to have actually won. Given the circumstances, this is not at all unlikely.
5. The situation is similar in New Mexico, where the election has yet to be called.
And while Palast doesn't say this, if you add spoiled ballots to the thus far uncounted provisional and absentee ballots, you get perhaps 7.5-8 million votes. Bush is ahead by 3.5 million in the counted votes. So it's possible that if every vote counted, Kerry would have won both the popular and electoral vote.
All of which is to say: good god almighty the Democratic party sucks. You'd think they'd be the ones making sure this didn't happen, just out of self-interest. But that's not how self-interest works in institutions. Within institutions, people generally act not so that the institutions will thrive, but so that they will retain their power within them. Thus, people with power within the Democratic party prefer losing elections, if the alternative is winning them in ways that dilute or eliminate their power within the party. The party winning does them no good at all if they lose personally.
Happily, from what I know, there's barely a Democratic party anymore. It is a husk, a shell, a candy wrapper with the candy eaten away by greedy ants all named Terry McAuliffe. It could be taken over by progressives, perhaps even more easily than the Republican party has been taken over by the religious right.
Posted at November 4, 2004 04:28 PM | TrackBackThere is an interesting book on the self-perpetuation of party leadership, published in 1915, by Robert Michels, called "Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy". You should check it out, along with his "iron rule of oligarchy" of party leadership.
Posted by: motionsuggests at November 4, 2004 09:06 PMcannonfire covers fraud battlefront: http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004/11/case-for-fraud-updated.html
Maybe there is a reason that the DNC is not making all the arguments that Palast makes: that Palast's arguments are merely Roswell-type conspiracy theories that are simply not credible. If Palast's claims had any sort of foundation, the DNC would be acting on them, as they did in Florida in 2000.
He argues that "if all the spoiled ballots were counted." Well, they cannot be counted because they are, by definition, spoiled, or to use a more accurate term, ambiguous. To argue that these spoiled ballots were thrown out in some conspiracy to defraud the electorate by a bunch of Republican poll workers is beyond belief. Just consider the number of people who work at the polls and how many would have to be "in on it." This means that all of these people would 1) all have to be willing to commit a felony by intentionally mishandling ballots; and 2) would all have to keep quiet about the orders they got from the higher-ups. The numbers in just one county would be in the hundreds alone.
Plus, in my 26 years of voting, I have moved many times and voted in numerous differenct states, counties and precints. These are staffed mainly by senior citizen retirees, who, by all appearances, are inarguably law-abiding and scrupulous. To say that these people were all part of some big conspiracy defies logic and belief.
