Ben: Sometime last week, I encountered for what must have been the one millionth time the tiresome complaint that our president ignores dissent. I like to dissect and analyse, so I got to thinking, what does it actually mean, to……

The machine always spits back my ballot, since in uncontested races I don’t bother to vote. That doesn’t mean I didn’t make a mistake; it doesn’t say which contest you failed to vote for a candidate in, or how many times you did it. So people might have gotten their ballot spit out and simply said, “Run it, it’s O.K.”, not realizing that one of the contest they had not voted in (at least as far as the machine was concerned) was one that they had meant to vote in.

Additionally, the machine doesn’t catch when you voted for the wrong candidate by mistake, which IIRC was an issue in Florida.

Then Palast needs to review causality - or stop being dishonest. (Although in fairness, I don’t read him, so I’m just going off of your report of what he’s said.) Counties don’t “get” machines - they go out and buy or rent them. Counties control the voting process in Florida (and in most states). The mostly-black counties in Florida are almost all controlled by Democrats.

Is it Palast’s (or your) contention that the Democrats went out and crippled their own voting efforts by deliberately selecting machines which would lead to the most problems?

The courts told Florida they had no right to stop voters who (supposedly) committed crimes in other states.

This is not an honest or accurate description of what happened.

In 1998, an appeals court ruled that Florida must respect the actions of other states that restored legal rights to their felons, in the context of Florida attempting to block a weapons permit for a felon who had been convicted in Connecticut.

In 2000, Florida decided to require these felons to demonstrate with physical documentation that they had received restoration in their states of origin. This is a legitimate ministerial role for the state, but they later decided that this was a mistaken approach, and it is now the case that felons who cannot provide documentation of their clemency status will have their cases investigated by the state.

As for Gore’s mistake, Life Is Not A Debate.

But our court system, for good historical reasons, is not a pro-active system. Judges do not go out looking for causes to advance; jurists do not appear on the scenes of controversy waving orders. Parties to issues must bring requests for action to the court, which then acts on them. Gore failed to do this; yeah, life isn’t a debate, but the political-legal system works in a certain way and follows certain rules, and does so for good reason. Gore’s foul, Gore’s harm. You’re in the position of the baseball fan who argues that the player should have run left instead of right, and that if he had run left he would have caught the ball, and therefore the other team didn’t really win. OK, that’s your opinion - but if we did things your way, it wouldn’t be baseball. And most of us want it to be baseball.

And Palast claims that mostly white counties got the machines while mostly black ones didn’t.

When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t even bother to ask how the machines were set up.

As for Gore’s mistake, Life Is Not A Debate.

Yes, you have. You just don’t classify felons as people who deserve to vote. The courts told Florida they had no right to stop voters who (supposedly) committed crimes in other states.

I don’t know what we were supposed to use this year, but when I went to vote the machine that was supposed to count them was broken. So we used a ballot that was about 14″ by 24″ with boxes on it that you had to draw “X”’s in. An inability to color in the box damn near flunked me out of kindergarden, but I managed.

Note I said Democratic politics, not democratic politics. People in Illinois may not like what’s going on in the White House, but don’t expect them to jump on the Democratic party bandwagon with enthusiasm.

O.K. Sorry. I just got annoyed at the whole thing when it happened. I looked at that ballot and said, “What’s the problem? We’ve been using those for years.”

2) Unless there’s been a neck-and-neck presidential election whose outcome hung on an ultra-close vote recount in Illinois within the 20 year time period you describe, the comparison you make is apples to oranges.

There have been some neck and neck elections during that time period, but not Presidential ones. Same ballot design, though. If there were significant irregularities, they’d have come out.

3) The punch cards people in Florida couldn’t figure out were associated with the “butterfly ballots.” I doubt very much that’s the design used in Illinois.

Don’t know why you’d doubt it. That’s exactly the design that was used in Illinois. Why would you assume the opposite?

4) The other punch cards people in Florida “couldn’t figure out” were ones in which the card was clearly punched for Al Gore, and Al Gore’s name was written in the write-in spot. Somehow, Republican lawyers and leaders couldn’t figure out if those cards were clearly intended to be votes for Al Gore or not, and so conspired to have all those votes thrown out. That’s why Bush won the election in 2000. Do you agree that those votes should have been thrown out?

Heck, no. If the voter’s intent was clear, the ballot should be counted. I do have to wonder why on Earth a voter would both punch a ballot for a candidate AND write the candidate’s name in, but it still passes the “clear intent” test. But it’s my understanding that there were other problems as well, such as people punching the wrong hole, or not getting the hole completely punched. I’m not holding any brief for how those votes were counted, or for any particular political party. I’ve voted for both in my lifetime. And the political party platforms here in Illinois can be … convoluted. Heck, my Democratic Congressional representative (Lipinski) is more conservative than a lot of Illinois Republican office holders.

Florida law specifies that overvotes should be counted as part of a general recount. Gore didn’t want to follow that law, because he thought (advised by his people on the ground) that he would lose such a recount. So he instead asked the courts for a particular, narrow recount that he thought would change the outcome in his favor.

I haven’t seen any credible report of any “group” being blocked in its effort to vote, so again, not sure where you’re going with that.

Furthermore, the way I heard it, Florida law did in fact require measuring people’s intentions. And probably none of this would have mattered had Florida officials followed court orders to let certain groups vote.

I’m not sure that you can credibly claim that Republicans “prevented” overvotes from being counted. USA Today’s comprehensive study of the Florida mess indicates that the only scenario where Gore could have achieved victory would have involved a hand count of overvotes (as you said) - but Gore didn’t ask for that, he asked for something different. If he’d gotten what he asked for, he would have lost the recount. Hard to see what that mistake has to do with us naughty Republicans.

“Floriduh” is indeed a rude way to phrase it. It’s also inaccurate. The evidence is painfully clear: it was the inability of Democratic voters to correctly handle the ballots that caused the debacle, not anything particularly Floridian. (Illinois had more spoiled ballots than Florida, but the race wasn’t close there.) Overvotes ran 3:1 for Gore. Republican voters apparently had much less difficulty navigating the ballots; unless you want to advance a theory of Republican hyperintelligence, the intrinsic problem can’t be that the ballot design was so horrible that ordinary Floridians couldn’t handle it, because millions of ordinary Floridians handled it just fine. It was just one group that had issues. We could maybe say “Dim-ocrats”, instead - but it would be rude, like you said, so never mind.

The USA Today report, which seems fair-minded to me, points out that it is indubitably true that more people in Florida intended to vote for Al Gore than intended to vote for George Bush. Unfortunately for the Democrats that year, our voting system does not measure the intentions of people, it measures their actions.

Fortunately, the Rice/Romney ticket in 2008 will be an absolute blowout, and all of this will be completely moot.

2) Unless there’s been a neck-and-neck presidential election whose outcome hung on an ultra-close vote recount in Illinois within the 20 year time period you describe, the comparison you make is apples to oranges.

3) The punch cards people in Florida couldn’t figure out were associated with the “butterfly ballots.” I doubt very much that’s the design used in Illinois.

4) The other punch cards people in Florida “couldn’t figure out” were ones in which the card was clearly punched for Al Gore, and Al Gore’s name was written in the write-in spot. Somehow, Republican lawyers and leaders couldn’t figure out if those cards were clearly intended to be votes for Al Gore or not, and so conspired to have all those votes thrown out. That’s why Bush won the election in 2000. Do you agree that those votes should have been thrown out?

[Edited to add: “Conspired” was a poor word choice on my part, because it implies a secret conspiracy, rather than arguments openly made in the media and in court. “Successfully prevented such ‘overvotes’ from being counted” is what I ought to have said. –Amp]

Who exactly do we see as a successful politician who “stands for something”? Arguably Bush stood for cutting taxes, putting conservatives in courts, and talking about values. Arguably, Bush succeeded in this matters. Arguably Bush stood for reducing the size of government, fiscal prudence, avoiding international entanglements and nation-building, preserving the Social Security “lock box,” reforming Social Security and other entitlements, simplifying the tax code, sealing our boarders and clamping down on illegal immigration. Arguably he has failed on all these fronts. Even his Faith-Based Initiative has been reduced to window-dressing. I’m not saying that he hasn’t accomplished a lot; I’m just saying that most of what he has accomplished has been done covertly, not through proud pronouncements.

John McCain has been trumpeted as an independent-minded, authentic politician. He was down on the tax cuts. Down on the conduct of the war. Down on the religious right. And he can’t get his party’s nomination. But McCain is running again. And suddenly he’s ok with the tax cuts, supporting of the war, and cozying up with the religious right.

Here in Minnesota we’ve had two famously authentic politicians recently, Jesse Ventura and Paul Wellstone. They were populist, and both won their elections by narrow margins. Ventura only won due to a split vote among the Dems, Repubs and Greens. He spoke authentically, he appointed a lot of good people, and he accomplished almost nothing legislatively. (Admittedly, that’s largely because the legislature was controlled by other parties.) Wellstone was quite authentic when he was first elected, and in “Conscience of a Liberal” he describes how he learned to surrender some of his views to get along. Notably, he supported the Defense of Marriage Act.

“Standing for something” is great for populists, especially if you want to appeal to people’s resentments. It’s easy to stand for “defending marriage”; it’s hard to stand for defending tolerance. It’s easy to stand for God and morality; it’s hard to stand for pluralism and the separating church and state. It’s easy to stand for tax relief; it’s hard to stand for fiscal discipline. It’s easy to stand for Victory in Iraq; it’s hard to stand for admitting your mistakes and cutting your losses. Many politicians railed against Viet Nam; how many got to be president?

So I resign myself to duplicity. Good policies do not equal good politics. I agree that people can be inspired by a bold, authentic persona. But I think we flatter ourselves to think that we can distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic politician based on seeing TV adds and debates. Rather I suspect we merely distinguish between an actor with lines well-tailored to his talents and an actor with a less-well tailored role.

Any actual elected officials in this discussion? I’d be curious to hear some real-world experience.

Klein doesn’t seem to appreciate how much fault lies with the media (and not only TV). It’s hard to blame politicians for constructing simplistic, poll-driven campaigns rather than talking substantively about issues, when the media is unwilling to report policy issues in any depth.

Not just yes, but hell yes. Nail on the head. I could cite lots of examples of this just from my own observation, but since we’re talking John Kerry, there was an article in the Washington Post during the summer of 2004 “about” a speech he gave on energy independence. There was more information about the content of the speech in the photo caption than in the actual article.

You also saw people constantly ranting on the blogs about how “Kerry should talk about THIS!” and “Kerry should talk about THAT!” I agreed. Until I went to a rally and heard his stump speech, and lo and behold, he was talking about ALL those things that people were so incensed that he wasn’t talking about! It’s just that if you say something and the media doesn’t report it… did you make a sound? Guess not.

If we all woke up tomorrow morning and none of our televisions worked, the world would immediately be a better place.

A) The hardcore base has proven it will vote for anything called a Democrat, no matter how neanderthal said Democrat is and

B) The Democrats either don’t realize or don’t care about the manipulations borner of Bush’s oh-so-cozy affair with Diebold. Therefore, nobody the Democrats will be President because the Democrats have surrendered control over the voting process.

Fuck ‘em.