I've been paying a fair bit of attention to the US election, and there are some frightening stories coming out of it, but the possibility that the whole thing will be rendered meaningless by one machination or another remains awfully high.

I can't find the link, but there was an AlterNet article awhile back which had an excellent phrasing. It went something like this:

Imagine that an election is in progress with electronic voting machines being used to tabulate part of the vote. Exit poll numbers and preliminary results show the incumbent, a rather extreme right-winger, to be losing by a substantial margin. Then, late at night on the night of the election, workers for the company making the voting machines are called to the county seat, and ushered inside by county officials. In the morning, the election results give the incumbent the victory by an unprecedented margin. Sounds like a fable? It's not. It happened exactly this way during (I believe it was in Georgia, and couldn't tell you the date).

And that's not an isolated incident. Florida has retained the same company that provided a list of felons which, in 2000, prevented huge numbers of legit voters - largely black - from voting. And the same chick who approved the list and defended it is still in office, thanks to an 'upset' very similar to the story I just recounted above. And so on, and so forth.

But the one I ran across today pretty much takes the cake for sheer bald-faced corruption, if true. It involves a disgruntled employee, so it should be taken with a grain of salt, but some cross-checking has been performed, which I'd need to see more details on.

Basically it involves a company being paid by the Republican party to register voters (that is, get their names on the list). An ex-employee alleges that his bosses basically ripped up the submitted forms from those who gave their affiliation as Democrat, and threw them out. This won't stop those people from voting - but it'll throw a rock in their path, when they show up on election day and find out they're not registered, despite having sent in the forms. There are technically
ways for them to get around this (called provisional ballots), but not only many voters but also many election officials either don't know they exist or don't use 'em properly. Not to mention the proportion who panic and/or head to a different polling station and so forth.

The cross-checking is that they have (reportedly) taken some of the ripped-up forms and checked with the actual list, and found that indeed those people weren't registered to vote.

Frightening to think how much effect these kinds of shenanigans could soon have on us, living in Canada, never mind our unfortunate friends to the south. I'm not big on the US Democrats, either, but I don't think that their influence is likely to fuck us up across the border, which is certainly not true for a second Bush term. (If nothing else, my employer prices things to most of its customers in US dollars, and the decline of the US dollar during the Iraq invasion made the difference between me getting a substantial yearly bonus last year, and what actually happened - not only no bonus, but a wage freeze for the year. So the Iraq war directly and clearly cost our household a few thousand dollars, in this manner alone.)

Let's just hope Michael Moore is right, and it's only that the polls are blind to a substantial voter mass who don't get counted because - before - they didn't care. And that despite shenanigans like the above, we're fretting over something which is actually no real contest.