The New York Times’ Ian Urbina (this time with Christopher Drew) continues to stay on point with his Electoral Failures coverage at the Grey Lady. Unlike Urbina’s last report, this time he wasn’t undermined by the Times headline writers. (Does anyone with a hard copy of the paper know what page this was reported on, btw?)
To his additional credit, he didn’t use the word “glitch” even once. Thank you, Ian. Here are a few highlights from his piece in today’s paper…
Tens of thousands of voters, scattered across more than 25 states, encountered serious problems at the polls, including failures in sophisticated new voting machines and confusion over new identification rules, according to interviews with election experts and officials.
Of course, BRAD BLOG readers will remember our desperate call for “Emergency Paper Ballots” here in the weeks prior to the election. On that, Urbina reports…
Wow. Who could have predicted that?!
And there’s more…Of course, the “experts” (word used very cautiously!) are beginning to notice that things on Nov. 7th were worse than they had originally understood. “Voting problems may actually have been wider than initially estimated, with many malfunctions simply overlooked,” reports the Times.
So how bad were they? How about 60,000 missing votes in Florida, bad. 20,000 voters who couldn’t vote in Colorado, bad. Or in Arkansas, where “election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000,” bad.
And then there’s the erstwhile election “expert” Doug Chapin of Electionline.org whose “expert” opinion ensures his presence in just about any mainstream media coverage of these matters. Mr. Chapin continues, on schedule, working all sides of the street in Urbina’s piece. It’s a tricky juggling act for this “expert” — mustn’t offend the Voting Machine Companies or the Elections Officials who pay his bills, or even, to a lesser extent, the Election Integrity advocates who might just call him a phony if he’s not careful — but, as John Gideon pointed out in yesterday’s DVN, even Chapin’s having a difficult time avoiding the obvious:
And the award for “Understatment of the Year” goes to…
UPDATE 9:01pm PT: Reader Adele writes to tell us that Urbina’s article was on “page 30 of 36 pages in the National section” of today’s paper.
This election was by no measure a success. Millions of voters were unnecessarily disenfranchised by deceptive legislation cynically called the “Help America Vote Act” which sadly, only served to prevent voters of every demographic from, uh, voting. If you could put a face on the 2006 midterm elections, it would look a lot like “the father of HAVA” in this photo. After four stolen elections, we still don’t know what America really stands for.
It would be great if American elections were only tainted with money sought by greedy corporations and politicians aided by armies of lobbyists seeking campaign money, but an extra layer of wanton power puts way too much frosting on this sickening piece of political cake. Nice to wash it down with a couple of articles finally casting aspersions on the biggest threat to American democracy. Virtual reality voting!
Will the “so called” main stream media lead us to fix this tragedy as vigorously as they led us to war, or will it turn away.
Again.
It seems a bit unfair to allege that Electionline is in the pocket of voting machine companies just because you don’t like an article they wrote.
I wrote a long mailbag letter to my local paper (they published it) about the tens-of-thousands of documented e-vote problems and the searchable database, just to prove it happened. I did this, after reading too many (all of them) one-sided mailbag letters, claiming that voting across the U.S. on e-vote machines went flawless and those claiming otherwise were “conspiracy theorists”. So, I linked to that searchable evote problem database, and asked if these reports were “conspiracy theory” or did this happen?
So, this NYTimes article is actually progress, and flies in the face of the 100% of articles claiming that “everything went well”…I also wrote about the EDA report, where the GOP stole 3 million votes nationwide.
To avoid the same problems in good old europe:
Until November 28. 2006 there is the a petition running against voting machines in Germany which may also be legally signed by Non-Germans. The petition is on the verge of getting enough signatures for a public hearing in the petition committee of the German Parliament, so please sign, here’s the link:
http://www.efve.eu/Petition_aga...ers_in_Germany
This article appeared on the front page of the Palm Beach Post Sunday.”Polling-place problems defy overhaul of voting system” caught my eye.I clipped it for the scrap book, along with the Don Wright cartoon. It shows Santa firing Rudolph after an election.As Rudolph walks away he says “Let me guess. All done electronically. Probably touch-screen voting with no paper record!
Two years ago, would people have understood that joke as they do today? I see progress, slow but sure.
FWIW, in contrast to the buried placement in the national NYT edition, the Urbina story was on the front page of the edition delivered to Boston subscribers, although below the fold.
Eli wrote –
If it was only because of “an article they wrote” I wouldn’t have said what I did. My comments — for the most part the first time I’ve expressed an opinion on this outloud — are in regard to their (Doug Chapin’s) persistent Voting Machine Company apologist statements and actions expressed over the past many years.
The comment is made after several years now of watching and reading Chapin’s actions and comments.
The Urbina article appeared on page 1 under the fold of the Sunday NYT in Washington, DC.
I noted it in another thread, but just winning the Majority isn’t quite enough, and the right-wing knows that. They still “succeeded” because they can stall any legislation they don’t like.
We need a 2/3 majority in Congress if we want to “make sure” something happens despite what the totally incompetent Preznit wants. All he has to do, at present, is VETO something.. and we don’t have enough power to “force it through” with a 2/3 vote. Yet, I suspect, if we had ALL the votes counted in ALL the races, we’d be a LOT closer to a 2/3 majority after the midterms (I’m guessing it isn’t/wasn’t possible to get a full on 2/3 with the midterms because not enough seats were up for elections.. but, it would have been a nice paving of the way for 2008 in case they steal another presidency to put someone in who WILL VETO all the legislations that comes out).
And the fact that they kept so many from voting (and flat out stole some seats, it seems .. aka Alaska) shows that they can keep swinging the political landscape in such a way as to prevent “real change” toward balancing out money and freedom in America. Hell, just saw an article that said the “very rich are oupacing the mearly rich”.. Soon it will be “the 500 rich guys passed new laws today… they get to roam in to any house they want and have sex with any teenaged virgin they chose”. Hmm.. smells like Feudal times!
Savantster #10
At least Bush is going to look like real bad vetoing anything since he’s only done it once, but of course, that won’t stop him. I have a feeling it’s going to tick Americans off though.