Diebold Electronic Machines Malfunction, Vote for Other Candidate

Cynthia McKinney, running for Congress in Georgia’s Fourth District, has released the following announcements on her website (copied over here for ease of reading):

(Decatur) After one hour of voting, the McKinney campaign has received numerous calls that the voting machines are malfunctioning. Voters casting votes for McKinney are reportedly having their votes switched by the machines for Hank Johnson. This is not a new problem with Diebold machines. Lawyers for the campaign have been alerted and said that if this situation is not corrected, Cynthia McKinney for Congress will be forced to take additional measures. Two Hours Into Voting, More Problems Recorded With Diebold Electronic Machines, Pollbooks

Just after the polls opened, numerous problems with Diebold electronic voting machines were noted. At one Rockdale precinct, reportedly a single Diebold machine malfunction affected the performance of the entire sequence of machines assigned to that precinct. Additionally, one machine didn’t have a plug and sat idle. In addition, workers were not adequately trained on the use of the electronic pollbooks, resulting in unnecessary voter frustration.

When one McKinney voter realized too late that her intended vote had been switched by the voting machine to a McKinney opponent, the polling place official’s response was “she needs to let us know next time before she casts her ballot.” McKinney campaign officials want to know, what about this time?

I know it’s all silly conspiracy theory…I know! But I can’t help but wonder:

What’s the most unbelievable conspiracy theory? Continue reading

The View From Inside The Studio

Today, I took my son on a homeschooling field trip to the local news station. It’s not a big place, and I can’t say I have watched their reporting more than once or twice in all the years I have lived here. We don’t have t.v. programming at home, but we have watched enough while travelling that I thought he would find it interesting. If nothing else, seeing the miraculous transformation of a man and a greenscreen in front of you to a man in front of a weather map on the t.v. screen is always fascinating, right?

We saw the receptionist, the array of satellite dishes, the computer banks, and the tapes where they store the commercials. We traipsed through rooms coated in t.v. screens where the incessant babble of ten canned voices talking at once threatened my sanity. We saw a live newsfeed from NASA, where an astronaut was rearranging the luggage in the bay of the space shuttle, and saw a producer typing in the afternoon’s newscript. And then…the big finale…we were let in to (very quietly) watch the afternoon news being filmed.

We sat on the floor, the children sternly admonished to keep silent, sniffles and giggles met with quelling stares. The two anchors (one wearing his slippers underneath his suit) took their seats and listened intently to the countdown. What I had failed to factor in was that this was the news, rather than the edited version I give my son off of the dozens of stories I read each day.

We started out with a local tale of a fourteen year old boy who was shot trying to protect his twelve year old brother when two men broke into their house and threatened them with guns. Then we moved on to suicide bombings in Iraq, missile strikes in Israel, an adult “novelty” shop which was robbed…but not the cash register. Only a life-size Marilyn Monroe doll and some “other items” were taken. About this point, I am gazing saucer-eyed at the other Moms in the room, torn between covering my son’s ears and bursting out laughing.

But we’re not done. Continue reading