Disappeared News

Maybe they're just practicing for November, but this seems extreme:

Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district. [Unofficial Tallies in City Understated Obama Vote]

My thinking is that someone should be fired. I mean, you don't announce zero votes, you make it believable. Sounds to me like election fraud incompetence. They couldn't even rig the machines properly.

Of course, there's plenty of time till November to learn to get it right (which means wrong, of course).

Seriously, as this Brad Blog article strongly emphasizes, the NY Times article doesn't provide evidence for any theory. I agree with that, but at the same time, it seems that New York City should be able to get its vote straight. Our democracy has been voting for so many years that this process should be both sacred and perfected some time ago. Ok, I'm dreaming.

While this story has yet to play out, I think it's a valuable illustration of how fragile and undependable our voting procedures have become. This makes them vulnerable to rigging, and there are plenty of people who will be happy to take advantage. Crooks and politicians are not that far apart.

Hawaii should not follow the path of disassembling a more reliable voting system in favor of one that is more vulnerable to manipulation. If it can be rigged it will be. And how will you know that it's not?