BBV: Why does NYT's KATHERINE Q. SEELYE hate democracy?

[AP]

He Pushed the Hot Button of Touch-Screen Voting
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
California's secretary of state is taking the arcane matter of voting machines and turning it into a hobbyhorse that he could ride to the governor's office.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/politics/15vote.html

Man, where to start? Seelye seems to be taking the hobbyhorse of fascism and is intent on riding America off a cliff. Since when is counting every vote "arcane"?

I sent the SoS an email telling him how worried I was about this issue, and when he started talking about it I was under the impression that he was listening to citizens' concerns. I'm glad that Seelye has set me straight. It's just political opporutnism.

I wish the NYT would put a reporter who cares about democracy on this story.

Here's some funny parts of the article:

Local officials say that despite demonstrations from computer experts that hackers can break into the machines, there is no evidence that anyone has done so. Moreover, voters may expect an actual, individual receipt after they vote; what happens instead is that a paper record, visible to the voter, is created in the machine. Officials have also expressed concern about paper jams.

This is her summary of the state of the debate? Lord.

Mr. Shelley's insistence on paper trails has prompted officials in four California counties to sue him. The clash is being repeated in other states and courtrooms and has even roiled the venerable League of Women Voters, where advocates of paper trails tried to overthrow the league's establishment, which has been against them. They settled yesterday on a compromise resolution to support "secure, accurate, recountable and accessible" systems, all code words for paper trails.

Seelye should have mentioned that the LOWV's support of the wrong side of this debate just roiled members into rejecting that support this past weekend. Now the list of supporters of unauditable TS voting is down to the venerable disability rights group that took a $1 mil payoff to roil courtrooms for Diebold.

Conny B. McCormack, the respected registrar of Los Angeles County, the biggest voting jurisdiction in the country, has emerged as one of Mr. Shelley's chief critics. Ms. McCormack said that Mr. Shelley had confounded local officials by handing down directives that require a technology that does not yet exist. Rather than inspire voter confidence, she said, Mr. Shelley has undermined it."

Many DU'ers following this debate might challenge "respected" as the adjectived decribing McCormack.


(Manufacturers have said that if the technology were required, they could supply it, but not in time for the November elections.)

"He put out a report on April 20 saying that touch screens were 100 percent accurate," Ms. McCormack said. "And then two days later he decertified them." She said such actions had "destabilized the entire election process in California and potentially nationwide."

Right.

[kaitykaity]

1. She was the "Jodi Wilgoren" of 2000.

She spent most of her time "Gore-ing" Al Gore, gleefully
repeating Republican bilge in her stories and pretending
it was news.

Check out The Daily Howler's archives for the full blow
by blow of Ms. Seeyle's work.

http://www.dailyhowler.com

[redqueen]

2. Disgusting and reprehensible

but far from surprising sub-par work from the lazy Seelye.

More LTTE's to write!

[Bread and Circus]

3. I don't know, but she did quite a few hack jobs on Wes Clark

during the primaries.

[BevHarris]

4. Heh heh. Well just you wait.

They named one of the kickback targets for the Black Box Voting investigation as a source in this story.

Kevin Shelley has guts, something I'm told is an unpalatable characteristic in today's political environment.

But I do believe we should help this along. Let's keep exposing these "expert sources" for what they are. Can anyone say "follow the money trail?"

Bev Harris

[AP]

6. If you had to bet on whether Seelye KNOWS, SUSPECTS, SHOULD KNOW, or

HAS NO CLUE that she's relying on compromised sources, which way would you bet?

You don't have to answer. It's a rhetorical question.

[AP]

7. And, does she describe that source as "venerable"? "Respected"?

I suspect its unusual to find a reporter who feels so compelled to stick adjectives which are unsupported with evidence before descriptions of supporters of the, well, "conservative" side of the argument.

At the very least, I guess it gives readers a cause for demanding a retraction of the adjective when the truth comes out.

[BevHarris]

9. What struck me is that this belonged on the editorial page

Not the news page. You don't use adjectives like "venerable," or prejudicial metaphors like "riding his hobby horse," or pure speculation and call it hard news.

[tom_paine]

11. They do in Imperial Amerika. Also Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union.

Face it, Bev, in most of the Third World, to which Imperial Amerika now belongs, this is how it is.

[AP]

17. She's trying to bolster the crediblity of witnesses she knows aren't cred-

ible.

It's the job of a defense lawyer, and not of a newspaper reporter.

She treats them like they are HER witnesses. She shouldn't have her own witnesses. She should tell the story.

[frank frankly]

5. NYTimes is very very dangerous. They seem to be getting even worse

Yikes!

[gumby]

8. Being a good little mediazi = $$$$$

[tom_paine]

10. Seelye is a disgrace, but she'd have made a GREAT Soviet Pravda writer!

If only she'd live there and then, which she so richly deserves.

Many good Soviet people deserve to have been born in the Old American Republic. As such, Kit Seelye, deserves to have been born in a nation that would appreciate her "skills".

That would be Soviet Russia, Commie China, Nazi Germany. She would have also made a WONDERFUL Information Officer for either Saddam Hussein, General Pinochet, or the Khmer Rouge.

If Kit Seelye is alive, something better must have died.

[Joanne98]

12. kick

[Eloriel]

13. That's so bad it's almost a

caricature of what "bad journalism" is. Unbelievable.

[Redleg]

14. "Arcane?" I suppose Seelye uses that term to describe things she is too

stupid to understand. Where do these "elite media" idiots come from?

[Cocoa]

15. the remark about "riding the hobbyhorse to the governorship" is terrible

very dumb and unfair, especially without anything supporting it and in the first paragraph.

The rest of it seems ok, and fair to Shelley. I consider it to be a positive profile of him.

Definitely nothing in there as over-the-top as your "fascism" comment. :eyes:

[AP]

16. What do you think about the adjectives describing LOWV and McCormack?

What do you think about summing up the debate by saying, basically, voters think they're getting a reciept, but what they don't know is that the machine keeps the receipt (as if to say, they're not even going to get what they want from auditible trails)?

And do you think "paper jams" is worth noting, unless it preceded by an acknowledgement of what a dumb argument it is?

And when I say fascism, what I mean is corporations controlling government, which is sort of what happens when Diebold pays a group $1 million dollars to do around OH to sue counties in order to get them to sign contracts for their crappy machines.

[Cocoa]

19. there's some news in this article

I hadn't heard about this study. With all the BBV activists here at DU, the hated, pro-Diebold NYT had to be the ones to break this news at DU, as far as I know:

A joint report issued yesterday by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the National Science Foundation endorsed touch screens with paper trails as the most effective voting system.

[AP]

20. I'm not sure that answers my question.

[AP]

18. Furthermore, how did this become a story about Shelley's ambitions.

This is the second story Seelye has written on BBV in the last couple of weeks, so she's clearly on the BBV beat.

If she had written a couple articles about other CA politicians, and if this were the Los Angeles Times, rather than the NYT, I might not think twice about using Shelley's ambitions as then lens through which to look at this story.

But that isn't her beat.

So you have to ask, what does using that lens do to the underlying story. Well, like many of the techniques she uses in telling the story, it hides the more important picture: is it democracy at work when voters say they want an auditble trail for their votes?

[Karenina]

21. Kick!

:kick:

[shance]

22. Good catch AP***

thanks.