Ohio Recount!?

Originally posted by wellard: Now that Bush has won an election fair and square perhaps we can now have bi partisan support to fix the many embarrassing loopholes and problems with the US election system. Previous to this years result any comment or action on the sad state of democracy in the USA was seen as a direct attack on Bush. Hopefully we can now move on (fingers crossed) because democracy is far more important than the transient detail of the currant victor or ebb and flow of the each of the two parties influence.

MUST we educate you on the principles of "Electoral College" AGAIN? geez people he won twice FAIR and SQUARE as you say. [img]smile.gif[/img]

And the "Sad State of Democracy" is no worse than it has ever been in the last 150 years or so. There have been other close presidential races and some of them were even subject to TRUE vote tampering.....Kansas was a big one back in the 1800's...but thats a whole history lesson I don't want to have to pull out the notes on again.

Take some history classes folks.


Edit: err some American History classes that is [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 12-21-2004, 02:57 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

[Stratos]

Is this thing still going on?

[Seraph]

If you want to look at election that was totally screwed up and featured widespread fraud I would suggest looking into the presidential election of 1876, where Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, had their electoral votes stolen by the Republican Party resulting in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes.

[Kaelas]

Originally posted by Jonas Strider: Kaelas ... you should check out what's happening over here in Washington state. We still don't have a governor due to legal issues with vote recounts. The race is VERY close.

Close indeed! (I looked it up here: http://vote.wa.gov/general/recount.htm )

Although the Republican Candidate seems to lead by quite a margin at the moment with the manual recount (38 of 39 countries counted).
I'll be interested to see how this pans out.

You guys in the good old US of A seem to have a thing for close (voting) calls.

On a different note: I've found something else that catches my interest, too, these days. The growing influence of the religious right in the country and the seemingly(!) slow withdrawal from the principle of the division of the secular(in this context: the political world) and the religious world. If memory serves me right that was one of the principles of the era of Enlightenment following the French Revolution and has been one of the mainstays of the democratic state ever since (division of state and church).

Interesting stuff!

Edit: Uh, I really should make a habit of previewing my posts before actually posting them... yeah, I should do that.

[ 12-21-2004, 06:41 PM: Message edited by: Kaelas ]

[Stratos]

Kaelas, there's a ban on religious discussion here at IW, so I hope you don't intend to start one.

Just mentioning the word religion usually results in a discussion about it.

[Kaelas]

No, don't worry. I know better than to start a discussion about religion.

Originally posted by Seraph: If you want to look at election that was totally screwed up and featured widespread fraud I would suggest looking into the presidential election of 1876, where Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, had their electoral votes stolen by the Republican Party resulting in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes.

One of the interesting things there is in that time period and with the way things were structured [img]smile.gif[/img] I would have been a Democrat The parties sort of switched roles a couple times since then.

[Chewbacca]

A new winner has been annoounced in Washington.

Is it a victory for election auditing or just another dramatic legal conflict?

Link


In final count, Democrat wins

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BY HUGO KUGIYA
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

December 24, 2004


SEATTLE - Behind yellow rope and a ring of television cameras, the closest and most protracted gubernatorial election in U.S. history came down to the contents of a few small boxes that sat atop a pair of folding tables yesterday afternoon in the election department offices of the King County administration building. At each table sat three people and a small box of never-before-counted absentee ballots.

The counting of the ballots gave Democrat Christine Gregoire a 130-vote victory, up from 10 on Wednesday. The results will be certified Dec. 30, and after that Republicans will likely challenge the results in court.

Almost two months after nearly 3 million citizens in Washington state cast their votes, after two recounts, numerous court filings, and two state Supreme Court rulings, the race for Washington's highest office was determined by a batch of 735 ballots.

"I'm glad they counted them," said Zach Oaks, 22, who cast one of the absentee ballots at issue. "I was worried my vote was not going to make a difference. I was beginning to wonder why I bothered to take the time to vote."

Oaks, who said he voted for Gregoire, is a part-time housepainter who also manages a motel on the Washington coast. He voted by absentee ballot because he is often out of the area working at the motel.


Republican appeared to win

Republican Dino Rossi was declared the winner of the Nov. 2 election by 261 votes, and he won the electronic recount by 42 votes. Although Gregoire, 57, led the recount by 10 votes early yesterday, this last batch of uncounted absentee ballots from King County turned the election more conclusively in her favor.

Election officials found 566 of the absentee ballots to be valid; 311 were for Gregoire, 191 for Rossi.

Gregoire, the former state attorney general, had been asked to concede twice after the Nov. 2 election and the electronic recount.

"This is the whole point of having the manual recount," said Bobbie Egan, spokeswoman for the King County elections department.

Election officials in King County, the state's most populous and heavily Democratic county, found 573 ballots last Thursday in a corrugated box locked in a chain-link cage in a warehouse. The next day, further searching yielded 162 more ballots for a total of 735. At the time, with only the state's three most populous counties yet to certify vote totals, Rossi, 45, led the overall tally by 74 votes. He would have become the first Republican governor to lead Washington in 20 years.


Mistake by the county

King County election officials explained that the newly discovered absentee ballots had been mistakenly rejected because the corresponding signatures that are supposed to be on file could not be found in the county's computer database. Hand searches determined valid signatures did indeed exist but for reasons that remain unclear had not been scanned into a computer. The voters, it appeared, had followed instructions properly. The error had been the county's.

County officials wanted to include the previously uncounted ballots. Republicans asserted that a recount, by definition, should only include ballots that were counted in the original election. The GOP successfully petitioned a state court judge to temporarily block inclusion of the new ballots. But on Wednesday, the state's highest court ordered the ballots could be counted, as it amounted to the county correcting its own error.


Prominent voter not counted

The mistake came to light largely because one of the absentee ballots in question belonged to, of all people, the chairman of the King County Council, Larry Phillips. He noticed his own name on a list of uncounted absentee ballots.

"I saw a name I was very familiar with," said Phillips, a Democrat, who was in Ohio on Nov. 2 campaigning for John Kerry. "I was shocked and stunned. I had not screwed up, I remembered to put a stamp on the envelope, I filled in the ovals completely, I signed my name. I was quite irritated."

Further investigation determined that Phillips' ballot was valid - and that many others had probably been similarly rejected by mistake.

[ 12-24-2004, 05:02 AM: Message edited by: Chewbacca ]

[Cerek]

Originally posted by Kaelas: On a different note: I've found something else that catches my interest, too, these days. The growing influence of the religious right in the country and the seemingly(!) slow withdrawal from the principle of the division of the secular(in this context: the political world) and the religious world. If memory serves me right that was one of the principles of the era of Enlightenment following the French Revolution and has been one of the mainstays of the democratic state ever since (division of state and church). Interesting stuff!

Even more interesting is the fact that the phrase "separation of church and state" does NOT appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img] The Constitution garuantees freedom of religion to all citizens. It only mandates that there shall be no STATE or FEDERALLY-sponsored religion.

In other words, the governent cannot openly endorse one particular religion to the exclusion of others.

The catch phrase "separation of church and state" came about from various court interpretations, but is not part of the original document itself.

[Kaelas]

Interesting indeed. Well, as long as religious beliefs and their interpretations are not placed above the laws of a constitution in judicial processes I shall be content. [img]smile.gif[/img]

I discovered this site about the topic:

http://theocracywatch.org/index.html


And this small tidbit:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...mandments_robe


Are the "facts" listed in those sites valid or not? I could not say. And I'm not one to judge.
It makes for an interesting read, however.