Posted on 04/15/2005 5:22:39 AM PDT by bitt
It looks like Teresa Heinz Kerry is rubbing off on her husband. And on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. For the Republican Party, this is a good thing.
You'll recall that last month, Heinz Kerry put on her shiniest tinfoil hat and blamed the Democrats' loss in November on rigged voting machines. As reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, she openly questioned the election results and fixated on areas of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes. "Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Heinz Kerry intoned, and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."
Asked for evidence of her theory, the ketchup heiress refused further comment. Glitches happen. And no technology is fool-proof. But unhinged Democrats have obsessed on the fact that the chief executive of Diebold, the leading vote machine manufacturer, is a Bush supporter in order to turn inevitable errors into a Vote-Swallowing Grand Master Plan.
As liberal journalist David Corn pointed out, "Left-of-center accusers have promoted contradictory theories." On the one hand, they accuse Diebold and other vendors of "putting in the fix via the paperless touch-screen machines." On the other hand, they claim that conspirators in Florida rigged "optical-scan voting, not electronic touch-screen voting." Or is it both?
Corn notes that scholars at Cornell, Harvard and Stanford dismissed the Florida fraud allegations as "baseless." And the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results.
Immediately after the election, John Kerry avoided the deepest fever swamps of the crackpot left. But Teresa's kooky pillow-talk has apparently taken effect. On Sunday, Kerry dredged up allegations of Republican trickery and voter scare tactics in a speech before the League of Women Voters: "Last year, too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated."
Kerry activists made much hay about the long lines and shortage of voting machines in swing districts. But their lawsuit in Ohio based on those claims was dismissed. And as Mark Niquette of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch told ABC's "Nightline," "If you talk to the election officials here in Franklin County, they'll tell you, the main problem was there just weren't enough machines overall, that even Republican-leaning precincts had long lines."
Singing from the same hysteria-promoting hymn book in Minnesota this week, Sen. Clinton further stoked Democratic madness. Sarcastically praising the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, Clinton pounced: "I believe that the right to vote and the obligation to count all the votes should be promoted not just in the Middle East, but in the Middle West! And in the Northeast! And in the Southeast! And in every. Corner. Of. The. United. States. Of. A-MEH-rica!"
The crowd went wild. Clinton continued: Too many minorities and college students have been "denied an equal right" to vote, she exclaimed. (Her "moderate" solution? An election reform bill that allows illegal aliens and felons and people without IDs to vote.)
The Democrats now seem to believe that the road to the White House is paved with paranoia. Well, let them keep babbling. The evil genius Karl Rove himself couldn't have come up with a better plan.
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This reminded me of something: Every time is see the names Clinton, Kerry, and Kennedy together, I think of the theme song of "The 3 Stooges". I know Teddy wasn't in the topic here, but the song played anyhow.
The only votes they're concerned weren't counted are their own--I was denied my right to vote and I'm a Bush supporter. It works both ways--I believe the Northeast was rigged in their direction to a large extent, and hence my vote was not allowed to be cast.
Teresa and Hillary are right, there was voter intimidation. I saw it first hand in Florida while volunteering.
The only part they have wrong is that it was Kerry thugs intimidating Bush supporters and voters. I can't count how many times I was told to get lost, and voters who approached me and other BC04 volunteers got vulgar tongue lashings from the Kerrorists. They tried to block our signs and stepped on our stuff. A couple of Kerrorists tried to bait us into physical fights too. Yes, a very welcoming environment for Bush voters, indeed.
The Donks want each voter to get a print-out of votes. This will make it much easier to run vote-buying schemes, because the voter can redeem the correctly filled out receipt for cash.
A voter reciept can serve no useful function for the purposes of a recount, because it would be patently impossible to retrieve them all, and there is no chain-of-custody over the reciepts, making any retrieved useless and suspect.
This is a bad idea, that needs to be put down, early and often.
In the 2000 primary I went to my polling place and there were NO Republican ballots. This was surprising because of all the Blue Balloteers that were supposed to vote for McCain. The poll workers told me that they didn't know where the Republican ballots were and I had to wait 15 minutes while they went looking for them.
Most of the proposals I have heard allow the voter to check and approve the receipt, but then it gets put in a locked box at the site. This would answer both of your objections.
Moreover, there are some clever proposals for creating bar codes and timestamps that authenticate the individual ballot receipts, preventing ballot box stuffing, while preserving anonymity.
I think it's a good idea, as I trust Republican politicians only marginally more than I trust the Dems.
-ccm
I'm with you there. When you have politicians designing a new voting system, you just know that both sides are going to try to build in things that can be exploited later. Everything they do must be examined very carefully. The usual well, that sounds OK, I guess standard will not be enough here.
I can imagine, then, that many Republicans left, not able to wait for them to come up with a ballot--what a shame.
I truly feel that those who are guilty are the loudest to speak. That is why we hear non-stop speculation and conspiracy theory from the liberals.
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