Our own BradBlog has laid out very well the disturbing issues surrounding Alaska's most recent elections. I won't be satisfied until these machines are gone. Please read Brad's entire article for the background.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8199
After a week of hand-counting paper write-in ballots in Alaska's three-way U.S. Senate race between incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski (who ran as an independent write-in candidate), Republican candidate Joe Miller and Democratic candidate Scott McAdams, the Associate Press called the race this afternoon for Murkowski.
Trailing by some 10,000 votes behind Murkowski, however, and with several lawsuits concerning the tabulation of ballots still pending, Miller is suggesting it's likely that his campaign will call for a "hand count" of all of the ballots cast in the race, not just those in contention during the counting of write-in ballots over the last week.
Given Alaska's years-long record of often-inexplicable election results, going back at least as far as the 2004 Presidential Election (and the first election as Senator for Murkowski who had previously been named by her father to replace him in the U.S. Senate when he became Governor in 2002); the repeated failure and insecurity of the state's Diebold election system; and the AK Division of Elections' truly remarkable history of blocking citizen oversight of election results ---much of which has been documented at The BRAD BLOG since late 2005 --- a thorough reconciliation of results by the Miller team would be both appropriate and helpful for all future elections in the state (and even for other states, where similar nearly-impossible-to-oversee optical-scan ballot systems are similarly used.)
<snip>
While "impartial, secure and accurate elections" are clearly key goals for every election, there is one word left out of that phrase which is required to assure that elections are indeed "impartial, secure and accurate". That word is "transparency". Without transparency, none of us can know if any election was conducted impartially, securely or accurately. In a democracy, nobody should ever be asked to simply trust in election officials that it was. Indeed, one of the items called for in AK's "Security Project" was a review of "methods to protect system from malicious insiders seeking to affect election outcome."
Alaska itself recognized that election officials are not to be merely trusted. We've had quite enough of "faith-based elections" in this country.
Alaska's track record on the election transparency front is very poor. Such that the Joe Miller campaign can help attain the much-needed transparency through a full reconciliation of all ballots cast in his state's U.S. Senate race, he'll be doing a service for his voters, and all voters alike, as well as for the cause of democracy in these United States.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
