The plane is about to leave, so just a rushed note to see Boing Boing: Vote Save Error .
This incident is a problem on its own….but alas it also shows why we can't allow camera phones in polling places — it would allow people to prove how they voted, which makes vote selling and blackmail feasible. Which isn't the point the post meant to make.
In Part One I described the first day of our ownership of a Kerry-Edwards sign. In this part two, I report the sign's untimely demise.
Orcinus reports there have been a number of violent incidents around the country in which people with the temerity to display a Kerry-Edwards sign have suffered for it. My story is much tamer: someone took the sign a day after I put it up.
I called the cops to report a theft, thinking that if this was not a unique event, it would help build a record of it. This being Coral Gables, a cop was dispatched within minutes to investigate the theft of a $5 sign. Unfortunately, we'd been out much of the day, and couldn't even tell him about what time it likely happened. The cop was very polite. I got the sense he had views about the election and was disciplining himself not to utter them; he was professional enough that when he left I wasn't even sure which side he was on. (Just in case you are thinking white male Florida stereotyped cop, forget it: this was a trim, no-accent, black man I'd guess in his 30s.) His main advice was that if we got another sign, not to put it on the swale (the strip of city-owned land between the sidewalk and the street), but rather on our property. Material on the swale, he instructed us, can be considered abandoned and thus anyone can take it. (My own opinion is that this rule does not apply to yard signs that are clearly fixed in place, even on the swale, but why believe me, I'm not a member of the Florida Bar. Anyway, it's the law on the ground that counts.)
So we went to get another sign. This was not easy as there was a national shortage of Kerry-Edwards yard signs. But we got one, put it up, and it's still there. Unfortunately, the shortage is so acute that the Kerry folks wouldn't even sell me a spare for me to give to Ms. 'Morales' across the street (see part one).
Meanwhile, however, the street has sprouted two other K-E signs … and one Bush sign.
Here's news from a study of the differing perceptions of Bush and Kerry supporters, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, based on polls conducted in September and October:
Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.
Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.
I don't find persistent (willful?) voter ignorance very cheerful. On the other hand, I suppose this opens a window for some good advertising.
A lucid essay at the aptly named Making Light, wherin not levity but illumination. The title may be Motivation and doubt, but the topic is management style and the world view of the PHB — and what it means to have an ur-PHB in the Oval Office. (Hint: reality need not apply.) Great reading. (And, as always, the comments are good too.)
So too, in a very different way, is Stirling Newberry's The Great Silence:
Bush Wilts without the Media Light, which begins with meditations on the 'ground game' in the last weeks of the campaign, and then takes off in a flight of plausible fancy to imagine the arc of the first term of a Kerry Presidency. Rather than a PHB, suggests Newberry, it will be a wonk's Presidency—at first.
One more reason polls don't matter: people who think they are registered to vote may not be. In Nevada, a GOP-financed firm purported to register voters, but secretly ripped up the forms submitted by people who wanted to register as Democrats.
There are dirty tricks in every election, but this is down there among the slimiest. Thousands of would-be voters may be effected. And it's not the only such story from this electoral cycle. See this voter fraud roundup and the one at Angry Bear.
The US doesn't have a great history on this subject, and I don't mean just the 2000 election. There's substantial evidence, for example, that JFK, LBJ and then-Mayor Daley stole the 1960 election by stuffing ballot boxes in Texas and rigging the vote in Chicago…mitigated only somewaht by some counter-evidence of GOP vote fraud that year. Arguably, Nixon's finest hour was taking that defeat relatively quietly; the counter-argument is he knew what skeletons were in his closet. (You know, this lot makes me miss Nixon. At least when Nixon and Kissinger committed a war crime, they had a somewhat plausible theory motivating it.)
This year, however, the reported evidence of fraud — not to mention the potential for rigging voting machines — leans very heavily one way, and suggests a pattern of voter intimidation (aimed at Blacks and Native Americans) and outright fraud that may continue on to election day.
How many fraud stories leaning the same way, in how many states, does it take before the validity of this election is so much in doubt that we need to ask if we still have a democracy in the real sense of the word?
And if we should conclude that we have failed Benjamin Franklin's test — a Republic, if you can keep it — then what do we do? The mind boggles. One wants to think about something else. Novels. Getting out the vote. The new Chumbawumba CDs that arrived in the mail. Work.
Is it best not to think about it until we know the result of the election? (Even if some Republicans are already laying plans to claim, as they did with Clinton, that only Republicans can be legitimately elected?) After all, it might not be close, and blowout one way would quiet criticism, espeically if it wasn't the party in power that had access to the paperless electronic voting machines.
Or, perhaps, is it already too late in the game?
Jotwell Blenderlaw