Richard Hasen: "The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-08-21/richard-hasen-voting-wars-florida-2000-next-election-meltdown
Since the 2000 election, the U.S has witnessed a partisan war over voting rules. Election lawsuits have more than doubled. Every day we hear about challenges to voter ID and early voting laws. Campaigns deploy “armies of lawyers” and social media provokes partisan dissent when elections are expected to be close. And that’s not to mention actual defects in the voting process. Even after major reforms over the past decade, our elections are still plagued with problems. Lists of eligible voters are inaccurate, procedures vary from county to county and election officials are often called partisan. Diane and author Richard Hasen discuss fixing the way we run our elections.
Guests
Richard Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science, University of California, Irvine School of Law
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Excerpted from "The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown" by Richard Hasen. Copyright 2012 by Richard Hasen. Reprinted here by permission of Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
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Voting is a patriotic duty in America and any insidious ingrate who would impede that patriotic duty should not enjoy the freedoms for which America's patriot citizens fought, sacrificed and died.
During congressional hearings on Voter ID, Al Franken smacked down Hans von Spakovsky over flawed custom-tailored briefings supplied to congressional staffers by the Heritage Foundation on Georgia's high voter turnout.
Among those who had Swiss bank accounts to avoid paying taxes in America were Holocaust survivors and children of Holocaust survivors. ? Were Hans von Spakovsky and his parents among those who avoided paying taxes in America
Are these ingrates allowed to vote?
The bottom line is that the Republican's and the operatives such as Ken Rove (a neo- Mark Hannah) backed by forces such as the Koch Bros do not want non-Republicans voting. If you can disenfranchise or turn away people that you do not want an election can be made. This is the reality of the situation sad as it may seem.
point well taken
I hadn't thought of that
from Bo
I'm originally from Brazil, where electronic voting reaches almost 100% of the population we have never had any scandals related to voting fraud, in a country where voting is mandatory. I don't u der standing why voting is so complicated in the US.
"Statman2 wrote:
Why not fully implement election monitoring via exit polls. The late Rod Serling's Twilight Zone re-emerges on Election Day. That is the only day of the year, and the United States is the only place on earth, where mathematical theory of sampling and scientific rigor of data gathering don't function. On other days and in other countries exit polls accurately call election results - Yes, the United States of America entered The Twilight Zone on Election Day. Even with President Obama's election, the final result was inconsistent with the average across the major pre-election polls (Zogbe, Gallup, CNN).
August 16, 2012 - 7:03 pm"
Reagan was the one who urged (Republican) Voters to deliberately lie in Exit Polls and they have been doing it ever since.
Monte Haun mchaun@hotmail.com
Statman2-
I've allways been disgusted with media early result polling. Back in the day when exit polling was all the rage I was polled on two different occations.
First time I told em to pound sand. Second time I lied.
If polling is such an exelent method of determining election outcomes...lets just skip the voting all together and take a poll.
Can not trust the media on exit polling...maybe an indipendent scientific panel.
Removed by author
Definitely agree about point about software of voting machines. The only way I could see this working is to take 2 programmers, 1 a Democrat, 1 a Republican, to look at the code basically line by line as well as any supporting files and databases it would use. Definitely not practical, but something like this is what it would take.
I commend Richard Hasen for introducing the important concept of "margin of error" when discussing the 2000 Florida election result. It`s simply a myth that one vote can decide an election. Our electoral systems simply lack sufficient precision to resolve an election result down to a single vote. What do we do about this? First, we should rate our electoral systems according to their precision (i.e. can they accurately measure the vote down to within 1000 votes, 100 votes, or 10 votes?). Second, we need to introduce a run-off system between the two top vote recipients for election results within the margin of error. This would have been the best solution in Florida in 2000.