From Ohio isn’t over yet (Bill Bumgarner):

Now, I doubt if there will be a reversal of the called decision. There is little chance that Kerry could pull out a surprise victory.

There is something far, far more important at stake.

There have been a disturbingly large number of reports of serious problems during the Ohio voting process. The same goes for the rest of the nation, but Ohio is obviously a focal point.

These problems range from potentially illegal actions on the part of “challengers” to lost ballots to mishandling of ballots to reports of voting machines reporting thousands of extra votes for one Bush (site requires registration. Bugmenot.com can help. I have summarized the story below).

By rolling over and playing dead, Kerry & the democrats are sending a clear message that the way this election was run is A-OK. The reports coming in from the field indicate that this election was not run smoothly. These problems need to be trumpeted from the rooftops to ensure that they do not happen again.

To my layman’s eyes, it would seem that the very tenets of our democratic process are at risk. If we cannot hold an election without some assurance that all votes will be counted, then what the hell is the point? How the hell can we continue to call our solves a model democracy whose role it is to spread democracy and freedom throughout the world?

Bill Bumgarner echoes my sentiments exactly. One of the pillars of democracy is being able to trust the results of the elections. I have been very surprised by the poor way elections are handled here. If I was able to vote I would be seriously pissed. The occurrence of voting problems is disturbing. For each uncovered problem, how many went unnoticed? How can you trust such a system where the documented problems are so numerous? I am not saying that the result of the elections would be much different without all the problems but still, it makes you wonder.

While Democrats might want to spend time reconsidering their political strategy in front of the obvious defeat, at least some of them consider that investigating glitches and making sure that next time around people could trust the voting system is quite important when you leave in a democracy…

Jonas chimes in on the issue noting the obvious lack of QA that was performed on these systems. The disturbing is that people have been talking about these issues for months and nothing seems to have been done about it. Do people really care about wether their votes are correctly recorded?

Wataridori 2 from the album The Wired CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share. by Cornelius

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