A Redo Of Flori-Duh

Published Sep 20, 2008

From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008

Email To A Friend

Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.

SPONSORED BY

During the 2000 election, Palm Beach, Fla., resident Sandy Blank watched, horrified, as her county became a mess of butterfly ballots, hanging chads, erroneous votes for Pat Buchanan—and a national punch line. (The Onion rechristened the state "Flori-duh.") The voting disaster inspired civic activism: Blank become a Palm Beach poll worker. "I wanted to change things," she says. Instead, six weeks before the presidential election, the situation there is as messy as ever, and a botched primary in late August only underscored the threat of another calamity. In that primary, roughly 3,500 votes went missing; then, after an audit, there were more ballots than voters, which should be impossible. But this is Palm Beach. "It's a crisis of confidence," says Blank, reporting a paltry 3 percent turnout at her polling station.

Voting-technology experts say that Palm Beach represents a checklist of how not to run elections. The county—with an assist from the state government—responded to the 2000 election in precisely the wrong way: by repeatedly switching voting machines rather than settling on one type and training people on it. "Switching technology is the fun, shiny stuff, but it's pointless," says Thad Hall, author of "Electronic Elections." "You need to focus on the procedures." On Nov. 4, however, Palm Beach will use its third system in three presidential elections. Most systems have similar accuracy rates, and the touchscreens that Palm Beach used in 2004 worked fine—but those were scrapped because of a new state law requiring paper ballots. "It's a lot to ask us and the voters to keep switching," says Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty. That law prompted another potential gaffe: the ballot design that Palm Beach settled on for 2008. Design experts recommend simple, familiar "fill in the oval" ballots; Palm Beach is going with "complete the arrow" ballots, where voters draw a line to finish an arrow next to candidates' names. Research shows error rates with "arrow" ballots are about 33 percent higher than those with "oval" ballots.

Palm Beach officials are expecting at least 500,000 voters on Nov. 4 and are redoubling efforts to prepare, convening a special task force. The state is on their case, too: Florida Secretary of State Kurt S. Browning is planning on weekly conference calls with Palm Beach's election supervisor. Running a smooth election, says Browning, "is not rocket science." In Palm Beach, apparently, it's even harder.

Member Comments

- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/09/2008 7:48:15 PM

They harassed her until she registered to vote six times!:
http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3145562&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/08/2008 11:54:01 PM

"Not all Democrats agree with Mr. Frank that such policies are off-limits to criticism. Last week Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama said in a statement: 'Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership, when in retrospect, I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.'

"Mr. Davis is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus."

'Rank snobbery'

Camille Paglia, who supports Sen. Barack Obama, has nothing but scorn for the way the media has treated Sarah Palin.

"The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses," Miss Paglia writes at www.salon.com.

"The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality."
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: Krohn @ 10/06/2008 6:11:28 PM

The Antichrist!:
When George Soros failed to obtain the election of his candidate, John Kerry, in 2004, he brooded for a while, even said he might get out of politics altogether, but he just couldn???t stop himself. He has stated publicly that he wishes to burst the ???bubble of American supremacy,??? because he says our preeminence in the world is a detriment to global ???equilibrium.??? So far, he has failed, but he keeps on trying.

And Mr. Soros has made no secret either of the fact that he sees the shortest way to effect political shake-ups, what he terms ???regime changes,??? is through very difficult economic conditions.

America has not yet felt the full force of Soros style economic shock treatment. But others have.

Soros made his first billion in 1992 by shorting the British pound with leveraged billions in financial bets, and became known as the man who broke the Bank of England. He broke it on the backs of hard-working British citizens who immediately saw their homes severely devalued and their life savings cut drastically in comparative worth almost overnight.

When the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 threatened to spread globally, George Soros was right in the thick of it. Soros was accused by the Malaysian Prime Minister of causing the collapse with his monetary machinations, and he was branded in Thailand as an ???economic war criminal??? who ???sucks the blood from the people.??? Right in the middle of this crisis, Soros dashed off his book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, which demanded a ???third way??? toward economic stability.

Wake up, America, before it is too late!!!!