Feint! NYT: "Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems, With Supporting Evidence on YouTube"

[IndyOp]

You must remember the iconic NYT article after the 2004 election, "Rumors, spread by blogs, quickly buried"... Yes?

Well, my, my, my, look how times have changed:

"Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems, With Supporting Evidence on YouTube"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/us/politics/08blogs.html

Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system.

And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube.

<snip>

Brad Friedman, perhaps the most dogged critic of electronic voting machine technology in the blogosphere, said he saw his site traffic spike at left-leaning Bradblog.com, as reports of machine malfunctions began pouring in from around the country.

“Folks understand by now that I’ll get these stories out so that they’ll get confirmed,” Mr. Friedman said.

That the blog now has a firm place in the choreography of national events — and in elections perhaps more so than in any other cultural exercise — is a boon to the democratic process, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

[Wilms]

1. .

[MannyGoldstein]

2. Nobody's Perfect, But The NY Times is Close

Every paper has "stuff" that happens. But, other than the period when Howell Raines had his reign of error (Judy Miller etc.), the NY Times is a shining light in a sea of mediocrity.

[EFerrari]

6. You must be talking about some other old gray whore. n/t

[lyonn]

3. Does this mean we should have won by a larger margin?

Those machines need to be trashed. With the repubs loosing this problem might get more attention.

[qnr]

4. Nice :) however, you should correct the spelling of faint, two entirely different meanings there

:)

[pacalo]

5. "blogs of all political stripes." Good to see everyone involved now.

Just remember who's responsible for all these new e-voting machines: SAIC (Scientific Applications International Corporation), of which the following are board members:

- Army Gen. Wayne Downing, former chief counter-terrorism expert on the National Security Council;
- Former CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman;
- Retired Adm. William Owens, who served as former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now sits on Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board;
- Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and veteran of the Iran Contra scandal.

Some of the most generous contributors to Republican campaigns are also some of the largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold. Most notable of these are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture, a member of the U.S. Coalition of Service Industries and a major proponent of privatization and Free Trade of services provided by the WTO and GATT. None of these contractors are politically neutral, and all have high stakes in the construction of electronic voting systems. Accenture was involved in financial scandals, and charged with incompetence in both Canada and the US throughout the '90s and 2000s.

Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in October of 2002, states have been required to submit plans to make the switch from punch cards to a primarily electronic system in time for the 2004 elections. It should be noted that the voting machine companies continue to hold title to the software— even after implementation. Populex, the company contracted to provide voting systems in Illinois has former Defense Secretary, Frank Carlucci, on its advisory board.

Project Censored: "Voting Machines Gone Wild"

[EFerrari]

7. Speaking of tanking product, Indy, today my local paper's

telemarketers called and tried to strike up a conversation by posing as the phone company. They wanted to find out if I'd gotten my new phonebooks.

When your paper poses as your telephone company's marketing department, you know they're in deep doodoo.

[IndyOp]

8. Hey, SF! So nice to hear from you post-election...

Even with the incompetence and fraud that occurred in this election we are in a whole lot better shape now.

My advice for your newspaper: Start print the NEWS -- people find it fascinating!

See DemocracyNow! for an example of how well a media outlet does when it presents the news as it was meant to be - as a guardian of the people against the powerful.

In other words: Your newspaper ought to inject some 'San Francisco values' into its operation.

:rofl:

:hi:

[EFerrari]

9. That or start really printing phonebooks!

:rofl:

:hi: