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US politics
Have Expat Democrats’ Primary Votes Counted? Who Knows?
If you are a left-leaning US expat in Europe, whoever you voted for in the primary – if you voted – I bet it felt fantastic to finally be able to do something politically positive for once.
Though not all the results are in yet, Clinton is ahead and Obama has pledged to take it all the way to the convention. The margins are narrow and small numbers could make a difference.
But did your overseas vote even count?
According to The Register and an American academic at the University of Bath whoever you preferred, Clinton or Obama, your vote may not have counted and there’s no way to tell:
Joanna Bryson, an American citizen living in the UK, used the system to cast her ballot on Tuesday, and the experience has left the computer science lecturer at the University of Bath questioning how anyone could possibly verify its accuracy, should it ever come to that.
Upon casting her ballot, Bryson says she got a message encouraging her to print out a receipt of her vote. That’s a common enough technique in elections that’s designed to aid poll workers in the event of an audit. What was unusual in this case is that the receipt contained only one piece of information: the candidate she voted for. There was no bar code, serial number or other mark to distinguish her receipt from thousands of others that might be printed out by other American expatriates.
Typically, receipts contain additional information that provides a unique identifier while still preserving a voter’s anonymity. In the event fraud is suspected, auditors check a small sample of the receipts against the recorded results and look for irregularities. It’s unclear what the benefit is of a receipt that records nothing other than the chosen candidate.
“Either they’re incompetent or it’s an empty gesture,” Bryson says.
Doubts have been expressed already about the reliability of primary voting technology. Our old friends Diebold and optical scanning are still in use and as unreliable and easily subvertable as ever. Add to that a new online voting system shown to be unverifiable and you’ve got a trust problem.
A canny candidate could use such a situation to their advantage – after all, how did Bush get elected not once, but twice?
I name no names and make no accusations but the Clinton campaign, for example, has shown itself quite ready to go as far as to challenge the right to cast a ballot in order to gain immediate political advantage. Not many scruples there.
It’s funny, Bush the Elder was all about the process too – I wonder if Bill learned something while they swanned about the globe together on their bipartisan world tour & photop mission of mercy post-Aceh?
More on the reliability or otherwise of Democrats Abroad’s primary voting process here.
Which court faction should you support?
Patrick Nielsen Hayden thinks it should be Obama, endorsing him because he’s the best choice, but far from the perfect choice:
I have a couple of caveats to add. I know perfectly well that Obama, for all his idealism, is well inside the “centrist” consensus on how America ought to conduct itself in the world. He was against the Iraq war from the start, and that means a lot to me, but he’s also not someone who’s going to make the kinds of radical changes to American foreign policy that I would make on Day One if I were in charge. He’s not an insurgent; he’s the standardbearer for a faction of the country’s political elite. I believe that, on balance, this particular faction happens to comprise many of the the smartest and most conscientious individuals from within that elite. So I’m supporting Obama and his train, people like Samantha Power and Robert Malley and Lawrence Lessig, just as a peasant might cheer for an aristocratic faction made up of reasonably decent individuals against other factions made up of out-and-out thugs. Not because the peasant doesn’t know the game is rigged, or doesn’t have the wit to imagine a better world. But because incremental change matters, and because the right incremental changes can lead, like water flowing downhill, to bigger and more profound ones.
Clinton shilling for Moon?
Scoobie Davis reveals that Hillary Clinton has sent a letter of support to the Moonie front Universal Peace Foundation,
quotes of which now appear in a video message on the foundation’s website.
Now might ask why this is a problem. Don’t most politicians in the US endorse or seek support from religious leaders? What’s so objectable to an Universal Peace Foundation anyway?
Nothing much, if it wasn’t a stalking horse for an rightwing religious loon trying to recreate the United States as a theocracy. Sun Myung Moon’s Wikipedia entry gives a good (if overtly cautious) overview of why it’s best to avoid any organisation with Moon behind it.
Hillary Clinton having ties, even indirectly, with Moon is another strike against her. He’s no friend of the Democrats and no Democrat should be involved with him.
When the lady smiles…
…It’s because she hasn’t seen the video of the campaign song she’s using yet. Hillary Clinton has been using Dutch rock band The Golden Earring’s classic mid-eighties hit “when the lady smiles” as her signature song (Bill apparantly having used an earlier hit, “Radar Love”, in one of his campaigns). She did this without realising it is song by a psychopath who through the course of the video unsuccesfully tries to rape several women, including a nun, only to end up having his brain operated on and the offended parts fed to a dog (!). At the time, it gave me nightmares, but now it seems to be a bit of a publicity nightmare for the Clintons because it is after all the country that thinks adult orientated shows should still bleep out “fuck”.
And of course, whether or not your campaign song is entirely political correct is so much more important than whatever politics you have…
anyway, enjoy the video: