11.08.2004

And This on Voting

Here.

Nationwide, there's a loose coalition of groups protesting the election, and news reports surface every day detailing problems with things like electronic voting, people waiting hours to vote and supposedly nonpartisan election officials making decisions that helped Republicans.

Three Democratic congressmen - U.S. Reps. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida - have asked the General Accounting Office to investigate.

Whether the election is overturned or not, said Phyllis Hasbrouck, it's key in the future to require paper ballots and to ban touch-screen voting. "If we don't do this, we'll never have a real election again," she said.

It's troubling to Bill Hawkes, a retired A.C. Nielsen Co. statistician, that exit polls and vote totals were so far out of whack. "I've spent my whole life in marketing. The difference is clearly beyond any sampling variability. ... The community of statisticians and media experts need to not let this be dropped."