Re: Florida ballot
What this Palm Beach ballot debacle emphasizes is the need to bring the
balloting process into the 21st century, stop using those prone-to-error punch
cards, and computerize it.
And what about the computer-phobic like most of those elderly people
who got confused in the voting booth down there in Palm Beach?
Also, given our current inability to create secure computer systems,
the opportunity for massive fraud would increase exponentially. When voting
machines were first introduced, partisan polling-place workers would
(before the polling place opened) initialize the count at a couple of hundred
votes for their candidate. That was standard practice in New York and
other big cities where the type of voting machine that maintains the
official tally were used. There was no way to detect the fraud,
because there were no physical ballots to scrutinize after the
voting was done.
and let's also
hope we, as a nation, get rid of the Electoral College so we never again face
the prospect of having a president who lost the popular vote.
So, in this election, where the popular vote differential between the two leading
contenders is now down to about 100,000 nationwide with millions of
absentee ballots still to be counted (more than a million in California alone),
what would happen if there were no electoral college?
We'd end up with hand recounts in every county in the country that's what,
with attorneys representing of both parties scrutinizing every single ballot for the
slightest irregularity that might disqualify it.
In that case, it's a virtual certainty that there would be legal challenges
still outstanding on inauguration day, and many thousands more voters
would have had their votes discarded for the most trivial of reasons.
It would even be likely that local judges aligned with one party or or the other
would be asked to throw out an entire county's vote based on minor
irregularities such as those in Florida, which occur everywhere in this
country. Do you think the will of the people will be fulfilled by having lawyers
and judges who are aligned with the two parties decide which votes are valid?
And by the way, I'll to take bets right now that, when all states have
certified their election results, the person who is now ahead will be behind
in the popular vote.
And what would happen if the President-elect died between
election day and inauguration day? Without an electoral college whose majority
would represent the winning (but now dead) president-elect's party,
the only viable choice would be to throw the election into the House of
Representatives. And if that body were in the control of the other party,
it would most certainly elect the dead president-elect's opponent.
Is that solution going to fulfill the will of the people?
====================
| Nullius in Verba |
====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory -at- primenet -dot- com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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