A VOTING SCANDAL?

There’s the possibility of an enormous scandal brewing with the GOP using voter technology stealing votes. I can’t tell if they’re doing it yet or just getting ready to do it-or to be able to do it if they need to. And don’t tell me they’re above that kind of thing. If these guys cared about honest elections, I’d be whining about President Gore in this space. Anyway, read the extremely disturbing story above. Then read this one.

Why, for goodness sakes is the mass media avoiding this potentially enormous story?

Meanwhile, you probably can’t read this one-since it’s in the Chronicle of Higher Education-a publication not only requires a paid subscription but also libeled me recently-but it is rather amazing.

Here’s a summary: It seems “a graduate student at the University of California at Riverside has been sentenced to spend 28 days in jail on consecutive weekends for tampering with a campus election conducted over the Internet. The student, Shawn Bijan Nematbakhsh, 21, had been charged with unauthorized alteration of computer data, a felony under California’s criminal code. Mr. Nematbakhsh pleaded guilty to a similar misdemeanor charge and was sentenced last week in Riverside County Superior Court. In April, while he was still an undergraduate, Mr. Nematbakhsh used the campus’s Internet voting system to cast 801 votes in a student-government election for “American Ninja.”

He later described the move as a senior prank intended to expose how easily elections could be rigged because of security flaws in the system. Critics of computerized voting, especially Internet voting, defended Mr. Nematbakhsh’s actions. ‘This Riverside student may be the first person in the history of the United States to go to jail for hacking an election in an effort to show the weaknesses of computerized voting,” according to a source.

Post found at Altercation

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Don’t forget what almost all the coverage of the presidential election wants you to forget. Elections in America are about money more than anything else.

During the 2002 election cycle, Republican candidates outspent Democrats by nearly $200 million. That’s the most important reason everything ended up breaking their way, though I’ll be amazed if a single network’s coverage even mentioned it. Bush has now collected $83.9 million. He has done so in part by aggressively selling government at the cost of zillions to you and me. The totals of his current kitty “driven in large part by just 285 men and women, who collected $38.5 million or more, which was at least 45 percent of Bush’s total take. This fund-raising elite, many of whom were beneficiaries of Bush administration policies, included 100 “Rangers,” who raised at least $200,000 apiece, and 185 “Pioneers,” who collected at least $100,000 each.”

Post found at Altercation