Samuelson in, Rembert out … for now
First recount changes county commission result
In The Charlotte Observer.
Nice how the mistakes get “fixed” when it means a Republican keeping her position.

A retally of early voting ballots has changed the result of the tight Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners race, possibly putting incumbent Republican Ruth Samuelson back on the board.
But totals could change again. And elections voting officials can’t say yet what caused the problems.
When voting ended Tuesday, Democrats appeared to sweep three at-large seats.
But on Wednesday, Republicans pointed out early-voting discrepancies that showed more votes in the presidential race than people who voted. Elections officials spent today counting the ballots anew. The end result: former school board member Wilhelmenia Rembert, a Democrat, slipped from second to fourth, a mere 28 votes behind Samuelson.
Democrats Parks Helms and Jennifer Roberts were first and second, and Samuelson was third, with 63 fewer votes than Roberts. Elections officials still must rule on whether roughly 6,000 provisional ballots will be counted. That decision could change the close race again.

N.C. Computer Loses More Than 4,500 Votes
In the Associated Press.

More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.
Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county’s electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. “If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes,” said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board.
Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.

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The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

By Thom Hartmann for Common Dreams.

The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the “erroneous” exit polls that
showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren’t
erroneous at all – it was the numbers produced by paperless voting
machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more
analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election
fraud in the history of the world, however, it’s critical that we keep the
largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing
private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and
boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will
enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time – and through the
efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters – we may well find
out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org just filed what may be the
largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers
and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit
polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate
in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses are
showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed
bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering
their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.

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A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America
By Joseph Berger for The New York Times.

Striking a characteristic New York pose near Lincoln Center yesterday, Beverly Camhe clutched three morning newspapers to her chest while balancing a large latte and talked about how disconsolate she was to realize that not only had her candidate, John Kerry, lost but that she and her city were so out of step with the rest of the country.
“Do you know how I described New York to my European friends?” she said. “New York is an island off the coast of Europe.”
Like Ms. Camhe, a film producer, three of every four voters in New York City gave Mr. Kerry their vote, a starkly different choice from the rest of the nation. So they awoke yesterday with something of a woozy existential hangover and had to confront once again how much of a 51st State they are, different in their sensibilities, lifestyles and polyglot texture from most of America. The election seemed to reverse the perspective of the famous Saul Steinberg cartoon, with much of the land mass of America now in the foreground and New York a tiny, distant and irrelevant dot.
Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in Brooklyn, said they didn’t even know any people who had voted for President Bush. (In both Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Bush received 16.7 percent of the vote.) Others spoke of a feeling of isolation from their fellow Americans, a sense that perhaps Middle America doesn’t care as much about New York and its animating concerns as it seemed to in the weeks immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center.
“Everybody seems to hate us these days,” said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. “None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, ‘We’re not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.’ ”

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Dan Gillmour has written his usual classy piece on what another four years of the Shrub will mean for this country.
Except for his agreement that Kerry should have conceded in the beginning of the piece, it’s a great one.

Four More Years

The Republicans have an even stronger congressional majority. They have shown how gladly ruthless they can be in using their power. Bush and his allies have never believed in compromise. They have even less incentive to govern from the middle now, even though the nation remains bitterly divided.
There’s no secret about what’s coming. We don’t have that excuse this time.
Here comes more fiscal recklessness — as we widen the chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else, cementing a plutocracy into our national fiber, we’ll pay our national bills on the Treasury Bill credit card for the next few years. Many economists expect a Brazil-like financial crisis to hit the U.S. before the end of the decade. If we muddle our way though the near term, we’ll still have left our kids with the bill.
Here comes an expansion of the American empire abroad, a fueling of fear and loathing elsewhere on the globe. This is also unsustainable in the end. Empire breeds disrespect.
Our civil liberties will shrink drastically. This president and his top allies in Congress fully support just one amendment in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Say goodbye to abortion rights in most states. Roe v. Wade will fall after this president pushes three or four Scalia and Thomas legal clones onto the Supreme Court. Say hello, meanwhile, to a much more intrusive blending of church and state.
The environment? We’ll be nostalgic for Ronald Reagan’s time in office.
This is not sour grapes. This is reality.
I hope, but doubt, that the Democrats re-discover enough of their collective spine to block the most extreme moves. If they do it’ll be a change for a party that stands for so little these days.
People say there are two Americas. I think there are at least three.
One is Bush’s America: an amalgam of the extreme Christian “conservatives,” corporate interests and the builders of the burgeoning national-security state.
Another is the Democratic “left”: wedded to the old, discredited politics in a time that demands creative thinking.
I suspect there’s a third America: members of an increasingly radical middle that will become more obvious in the next few years, tolerant of those who are different and aware that the big problems of our times are being ignored — or made worse — by those in power today.
That third America needs a candidate. Or, maybe, a new party.

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