More ballot shenanigans (Shallow Thoughts)

More ballot shenanigans

The Florida post office has somehow lost 58,000 absentee ballots in Broward County, FL.

They say they're mailing out new ballots, but that (not mentioned in the article) blithely assumes that everyone who voted absentee did so frivilously, not because they were, say, going to be out of town during the election.

By a staggering coincidence, Broward was the county which gave Gore the biggest margin in 2000.

Meanwhile, news from the EFF from last week when I was out of town: Santa Clara County poll workers are being trained not to offer voters a chance to use paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines.

I've been rather hoping that the EFF (or someone) would organize protests near polling places, trying to inform voters of their rights. But no such luck. Instead, they've set up a site with a big flash movie with monotonous music and no information that couldn't have been shown better in a simple fast-loading html page. If you want to watch the flash movie, it's at PaperOrPlastic2004.org but there's really nothing else there besides the movie.

Spread the word anyway. Tell everyone you know in the affected counties (Santa Clara, Orange, Alameda, and Riverside Counties. Napa, San Bernardino, Merced, Plumas, Shasta, Tehama, and Riverside counties) that they can request a paper ballot, and that way leave a paper trail that can be verified in case of a recount.

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 23:43 Oct 28, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]