Although Obama is currently WAY ahead in the polls, I remain cautiously pessimistic until the race is safely over, and I urge you to come to your polling place with a notepad and camera in hand, to take note of anything strange that may happen when you are voting.
My report
show more...
from December 2004 on the voting irregularities in Ohio.
Here's why: whoever was messing with our elections in 2000 and 2004 is still in control of them. Very little has changed between now and then in the voting accuracy and/or recount department. Everything that we learned from Ed Felten and his team at Princeton University still holds. All the dangers from not having a voter verifiable paper trail are still in place -- for instance, as a protection against "vote-switching" software, which has apparently reared it's ugly head again.
These dangers have become so widely understood, and become such a part of our American culture, that the Simpsons even parodied it for a laugh.
We're laughing now, but are we going to be laughing when McCain somehow beats Obama, in the end, in what we're supposed to believe is another close race?
There's a recently-released documentary on this subject, Stealing America, by award-winning film maker Dorothy Fadiman. The film uses a great deal of my and my brother in-laws' archived news footage from the 2004 and 2006 elections.
In the 2004 election especially, it was amazing to me how the news footage was able to illustrate the strange sequence of events that took place in the middle of the night with both the voting count and the exit poll numbers. There was evidence of the vote-switching too, although, at the time, most of it was explained away as "glitches."
show less...