Friends, check this out–not just my letter but this excellent site, which was recently begun by media scholar Stuart Ewen:

http://www.rejectedletterstotheeditor.com/politics3.html

If you should write a letter to the press, and the press rejects it, consider sending it to RLTE.

(As they ought to have “elections” as a separate category, and will do so if they get enough material, please be especially inclined to send them letters on that subject. Also, see Paul Lehto’s excellent letter in the previous issue, No. 2.)

MCM

That’s “hand-counted paper ballots.”

MCM

Hand-counted paper ballots: FAQ

First there was the news of Ann Coulter’s voter fraud in Florida–a
rap that AP has reported, wrongly, she just beat. And now here’s another
one in North Carolina.

MCM

Congressman McHenry’s Campaign Aide Indicted
Posted by Michael Rey

By Laura Strickler and Michael Rey
The CBS News Investigative Unit has learned a man who was a field
coordinator in Congressman Patrick McHenry’s (R-NC) 2004 campaign has
been indicted for voter fraud in North Carolina.

The indictment charges that Michael Aaron Lay, 26, illegally cast his
ballot in two 2004 Congressional primary run-offs in which McHenry
was a candidate. The charges indicate that Lay voted in a district
where it was not legal for him to vote.

At the time Lay was listed as a resident in a home owned by
32-year-old McHenry but campaign records indicate Lay’s paychecks
were sent to an address in Tennessee. McHenry won the primary by only
86 votes. According to Gaston County, North Carolina District
Attorney Locke Bell, Lay was indicted on Monday, May 7 by a local
grand jury.

Read more.

Election Theft Goes Global
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Free Press
Posted on May 12, 2007, Printed on May 12, 2007

From Ohio and California to Scotland and France, the disputes surrounding electronic voting machines have gone truly global.

E-voting machines have already been extensively studied and condemned by a wide range of expert committees, commissions and colleges, including the General Accountability Office, the Carter-Baker Commission, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Stanford University and others. Rigging of a recount in Cleveland has resulted in two felony convictions. The failures of e-voting machines have been the subject of numerous documentary films, including the aptly titled HBO special “Hacking Democracy.”

Now the secretaries of state in Ohio and California are subjecting e-voting to still more official review. Ohio’s Jennifer Brunner has announced she’ll seek bids to conduct independent studies of both touch-screen machines, which record votes electronically, and optical scanners, which tabulate paper ballots electronically.

Brunner has already removed the entire board of elections of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) in part because of a major fiasco caused by new electronic machines in the state’s 2006 primary election. Voting rights activists vehemently opposed the $20 million purchase, but it was rammed through by Board Chair Robert Bennett and Executive Director Michael Vu.

Read more.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/10/cbs-fires-gen-batiste-over-votevets-ad

Among the Disbelievers
by DANIEL LAZARE

Imagine it’s Paris in the spring of 1789 and you have
just announced that you are an inveterate foe of tyrants
and kings. Obviously, your message is not going to fall
on deaf ears. But now that you’ve made it clear what
you’re against, what are you for? Do you favor an
aristocratic constitution in which power devolves to the
provincial nobility? Would you prefer a British-style
constitutional monarchy? Or do you believe in all power
to the sans-culottes? How you answer will shape both
your analysis of the situation and the political tactics
you employ in changing it. It may also determine whether
you wind up on the chopping block in the next half-
decade or so.

This is the problem, more or less, confronting today’s
reinvigorated atheist movement. For a long time,
religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor
entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite
unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and
Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too
far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name
of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of
evil and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian
evolution. As a consequence, religion now looks nearly
as bad as royalism did in the late eighteenth century.
But while united in their resolve to throw the bum out–
God, that is–the antireligious forces appear to have
given little thought to what to replace Him with should
He go. They may not face the guillotine as a
consequence. But they could end up making even bigger
fools of themselves than the theologians they criticize.

Richard Dawkins is a case in point. It is no surprise
that, along with Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith
and Letter to a Christian Nation, and Daniel Dennett,
author of Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural
Phenomenon, he has emerged at the head of a growing
intellectual movement aimed at relegating religion to
the proverbial scrapheap of history (which by this point
must be filled to overflowing). He’s bright, obviously,
a lively writer–his 1978 book The Selfish Gene is
regarded as a pop science classic–and as an
evolutionary biologist, he’s particularly well equipped
to defend Darwin against neofundamentalist hordes for
whom he is the Antichrist. But Dawkins is something else
as well: fiercely combative. Other scientists have tried
to calm things down by making nice-nice noises
concerning the supposedly complementary nature of the
two pursuits. Einstein famously said that “science
without religion is lame, religion without science is
blind,” while the late paleontologist Stephen J. Gould
once characterized the two fields as “non-overlapping
magisteria” that address different questions and have no
reason to get in each other’s way. But Dawkins, to his
great credit, is having none of it. Although he does not
quite come out and say so, he seems to have the good
sense to realize that no two fields are ever truly
separate but that, in a unified body of human knowledge,
or episteme, all overlap. Conflict is inevitable when
different fields employ different principles and say
different things, which is why an evolutionary biologist
can’t simply ignore it when some blow-dried TV
evangelist declares that God created the world in six
days, and why he’ll become positively unhinged should
the same televangelist begin pressuring textbook
publishers to adopt his views.

Read more.