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[Wilse]

from NY times, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/opinion/27krug.html

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a suspect election.

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Florida:

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake.
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Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his handpicked election officials. Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans.

[KennyR]

Hands up who didn't think Jeb Bush was a corrupt {bleep} even before this?

[Wilse]

KennyR wrote:
Hands up who didn't think Jeb Bush was a corrupt {bleep} even before this?

Funnily enough, from:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/robert_steinback/9202282.htm?1c

OK. Everyone who believes that Jeb Bush's 2004 felon-voter purge list debacle was absolutely and positively an innocent mistake, raise your hand.

Really? That many? I was afraid of that.

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Once, the American voter had a healthy suspicion of all politicians, da bums. Sometimes we acknowledged a preference for our party's crook over their crook, but we took pride in not being deluded regarding the nature of the animal. Honest, genuine, straight-shooting politicians were revered regardless of party, while shady characters were viewed with distrust even if we voted for them, and would again.

That era is gone. Today, we're suspicious only of the other party's politicians. Those of our party, we defend with a blind and blinding passion no matter how dubious the logic in doing so.

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