Tuesday, November 07, 2006

For my money,

the place to be online today is Talking Points Memo. For this sort of thing, which JMM is tracking pretty carefully:

And from Sullivan County, Tennessee, where TPM Reader SJ tried to vote:

Went to my precinct to vote and all 3 machines were not working. This precinct has a lot of lower-income families and public housing. They finally got one of the machines going, but the lines were out the door - I waited close to an hour and had to get to work. I wasn't the only one - most of those leaving were young(er) working people more likely to vote Democratic. I'll be coming back later to vote, but how many of those that left will be able to do that? You would think the machines would have at least been tested and working before the actual election day.

We're not going to be able to post every anecdote like this that we receive today. It would be beside the point. We'll be looking for trends and patterns. But regardless of whether you subscribe to deep, dark conspiracy theories of GOP election trickery, voting should be easy, accurate, and fair. It's not. The system is broken.

-- TPM Reader DK

I think that THIS is the most important story today, not whatever modest shifts might take place in partisan alignment in the House and Senate (yawn), but the inescapable conclusion that the United States of America does not conduct free and fair elections.

1 comment:

TheDudeAbides said...

Why is voting such a difficult process in America? In Israel, they have envelopes and pieces of paper. Things are clearly marked and there is a paper trail "just in case." Parties are represented by slips of paper and they have Hebrew and English on them. You would have to be extremely cognitively impaired to make a mistake and there is no issue of electricity or machines of any kind involved in the voting booths. From what I am told, at the end of the election, envelopes are sliced open and a few machines read all the pieces of paper...its so simple...