Vote notes

Some important vote-manipulation stories demand your attention:

1. Grag Palast reveals that Bushco, in association with our good friends at ChoicePoint -- and all under the pretense of "anti-terrorism" -- hopes to interfere with this Sunday's vote in Mexico.

ChoicePoint, you will recall, provided the inaccurate caging list which disallowed the votes of so many African-Americans in Florida in 2000. The Supreme Court did not elect Bush -- ChoicePoint did. This data-mining company, which hopes to learn everything about everybody, may be the most dangerous company in America.

And in Latin America.

2. Brad Friedman does a superb job of skewering the San Diego Union Tribune's reportage on the security breaches in the CA-50 election -- breaches reflected in other races.

The underlying theme of Brad's piece: Why are mainstream reporters often held to less stringent standards than those which apply to bloggers? Turn on any AM radio or Cable "news" station, keep your ears open for an hour, and you will no doubt hear at least one piece of off-base pseudo-reporting. Yet bloggers -- unpaid pundits engaged in a daily dialogue with their readers -- are castigated as poor sources of information. I would argue that the bias ought to run in the other direction. When a blogger is ignorant (as I often am), readers quickly step in and offer a straighter skinny. The mainstream media does not have that self-correcting mechanism.

3. Bill Clinton supports RFK jr.'s piece on election fraud.

Asked his opinion about Robert Kennedy Jr.'s recent article in Rolling Stone, charging that John Kerry, not George Bush, won the majority of votes in Ohio and thus won the 2004 presidential election, Clinton said Kennedy made "a compelling case."

And, he said, "I think there's no question that Al Gore would have won Florida" if all the votes had been counted accurately and all the people who wanted to vote had been able to.

Very good, although I wish Clinton had progressed from conceding the odious effects of caging lists in Florida to mounting a larger argument against computerized voting.

A digression: One of the interesting themes of the afore-cited article concerns the alternative press, which attacked Clinton relentlessly during his presidency. (The afore-cited remarks came during an address to a convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.) Most alternative weeklies tend toward the left -- or the pseudo-left, in the case of the L.A. Weekly. The rightists, who live in a fantasyland world of their own concoction, love to believe that Clinton received unending affection from progressive media outlets. In the real world, that was far from the case. Now that the same alternative press organs have gotten a good look at Republicanism run amuck, I doubt that we will hear the same petty snipings the next time a Dem achieves high office. If there is a next time.

4. The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting Systems Security, an organization that comes out of the New York University School of Law, has issued a damning report:

All three of the nation's most commonly used electronic voting systems are vulnerable to software attacks - attacks that could affect the outcome of local or national elections.

More:

* The systems are vulnerable to the injection of corrupt software or attack programs designed to take over a machine.
* Automatic audits are necessary.
* Wireless components are particularly at risk of infiltration, and the report recommends banning such components.
* Most states haven’t implemented measures to detect software attacks.

5. Finally, I wish Dems would stop crowing about polls demonstrating a voter preference for a Democratically-controlled Congress. Gerrymandering and the Constitution (which gives small states disproportionate power) still place the advantage with the Republicans.