August 16, 2004

The fix may be in, yet again... Bob Herbert of that liberal rag, the New York Times (reg required, blah blah...) writes a little Op-Ed on what looks like it could be more shady goings-on in the Sunshine State's voting situation. Are we just being paranoid, or not paranoid enough?
posted by surlyboi 20 years ago
  • Not paranoid enough.
  • Yeah ... thats sure smells fishy alright. Fishy like a halibut left on the backseat of a VW Golf in the Florida sun.
  • I asked if all the people interrogated were black. "Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at - yes,'' he said. He also said, "Most of them were elderly." When I asked why, he said, "That's just the people we selected out of a random sample to interview." Hmm... I'm going to go with option (B): Not paranoid enough.
  • For those that want to get around registration for newspaper sites, BugMeNot is an excellent little tool. You give it the URL and it gives you a login/password. If you use FireFox, there's even an extension that lets you right click on a site and click BugMeNot and it will pop up a window with a login/password for that site. It comes in handy when you're only interested in a single article from a site you might not read again for quite some time (and would probably forget your login information by then.)
  • I have a wickedly paranoid vision myself, some days. Fable One [I hope]: 1)Bush calls home 70,000 troops from Europe. 2)Has them cordon off RNC. 3)Has them cordon off all the voting booths in the US come November. Fablle Two: Meanwhile the FBI -- under pretext of keeping trouble down -- visits potential protestors nationwide with the object of interogating/intimidating them. Oh. Wait. That's nonfiction!
  • Liberal Rag? I'm taking that as a joke, hoping that was what you meant it to be.
  • MonkeyFilter: Fishy like a halibut left on the backseat of a VW Golf in the Florida sun.
  • In Soviet Russia, halibut leaves YOU on the backseat of...er...wait, isn't this the window I was browsing Slashdot in?
  • In Soviet Russia, the Halibut and You are Comrades, not to be left in a Backseat of a capitalist automobile contraption, but to Work Together to bring Strength and Unity!
  • I am amazed that any government would even momentarily consider, even having been hit over the head with a ballpeen hammer after finishing a mickey-laden bottle of scotch, using those machines for voting. And hey, Florida was willing to disenfranchise minorities in 2000, then made it illegal to make public reproductions of the purged voter list immediately afterward, so why should door-to-door intimidation be a shock? I for one welcome our new Bush overlords.
  • From the second page of homunculus' link (emphasis mine): "Rather than completely testing the vote-counting codes, there is some secretive testing of systems by three private companies that are chosen by the pro-voting-business National Association of State Election Directors. The companies consult obsolete pro-company and completely voluntary standards promulgated by the Federal Election Commission and get paid by the very companies whose equipment is being tested. In the real world, isn't that called "conflict of interest"?
  • In Soviet Russia, Diebold now known as "Dictator's Mother".