I really don't think that anyone cares who gets the Presidency (of the USA) anymore. It seems like we're going to too much trouble to decide whether it's going to be an imbecilic moron or a sleazy liar. Neither of these traits are really desirable of a major world leader.

Now in Florida they’ve decided to resort to counting the votes by hand. Excuse me, but what the hell is this all about?! I could’ve sworn I heard Bill Daley (Gore’s campaign chairman) say “We all want this to be over with as soon as possible”. I do believe that demanding hand counts goes against what they’ve been saying all along. How many times does Bush have to win before they admit that he won?

I have a feeling that the whole purpose of this Gore Campaign is to dupe the people into making him President. He doesn’t want to win fairly; he just wants to win. Now, in a final attempt to gain the upper hand, he is trying to increase the margin of error by trusting exhausted human beings to count the ballots by hand.

I see two problems with this hand counting method. First, it increases the margin of error, as I said before. Believe it or not, computers are much more accurate than humans when it comes to doing monotonous tasks such as counting things. Not to mention people are biased. People are not only biased, but they grow tired of monotonous labor. Sooner or later, these counters are going to just give in to Al’s scheme and start counting the votes in his favor. They’ll become so strung out on counting ballot after ballot that they will simply start adding more and more votes to the Gore pile just to get this crap over with.

What do you think? Drop me an e-mail at Jebbie2001@aol.com

Not to be abrasive but:
I have a feeling that the whole purpose of this Gore Campaign is to dupe the people into making him President.
should be submitted to the Journal of Obvious Facts, published by the Hot Water Society for Bimanualpigiolocation.

Anyway, back to the point: hand counting of votes is what most of the world does. Italy does it, Mexico does it, France does it ... and there are methods to make it reliable.
Actually more reliable than the bizarre US method, where you have poorly designed voting machines and no national control over the voting process (and no Election Tribunal or Election Institute).
For example, in the Italian vote every ballot is scrutinized by the voting section president, and recorded by the voting section secretary. In the section, during the voting AND the counting, there are "watchers", nominated by the political parties.
Voting is done by pencil and paper (using a kind of pencil that you cannot erase). The ballot boxes, after the counting, are stored, and our electoral law allows recounting by party request.

It is not a fraud proof system (to claim that would be idiotic), but it works fairly well.

Of course, such a scheme requires a large number of people that are actually interested enough in the elections to donate two days of their lifes in the interest of democracy. This could be a problem in the US, at least judging from the nodes about jury duty.

And another thing: the Mexico experience shows that, to guarantee clean elections, it helps to have something like a Federal Electoral Institute, that's to say an autonomous (like the Federal Reserve) body that watches over campaign expense, designs the ballots, prints them, distributes them, runs the elections and does the counting.

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