david's doodles

Waiting for the October Surprise

Having just noted last week that Riverbend had not written for some time, I saw that an article appeared the next day. Faiza also recently picked up her keyboard again after a long absence.

Faiza writes:

I have stopped writing on my web site for a while now... And the reason is perhaps because I was occupied working with the Iraqis who fled the hell of life inside Iraq, or perhaps that I was bored from the same talk about the painful reality that is going on for more than three years, until I no longer like to talk, as if repeating the same words, uselessly.

Riverbend begins her latest piece (on the Lancet study):

This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I’d be filled with a certain hopelessness that can’t be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.

These sentiments are easy to understand. It is five years since the 9/11 criminal acts of a handful of assassins, most of them from Saudi Arabia, set the so-called War on Terror in motion. That’s longer than the time that the US was involved in the Second World War. It should also be no surprise that the obvious failure of this enterprise is a factor in the upcoming US mid-term elections.

“

the letter threatened immigrants with jail time if they voted in the upcoming election

”

 -- Republican campaign, California

These elections are traditionally held on the first Tuesday of November - that’s November 7 this year. Meanwhile there is considerable conjecture about what team Bush will do to prevent imminent political meltdown for the Republicans. We are holding our collective breath in anticipation of an “October Surprise”.

With so many districts gerrymandered to create safe seats for incumbents, only a few races are in contention. Even so, many are predicting a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives or the Senate, or even both.

Personally, I don’t think we can forecast the results with any confidence at all. Apart from the already mentioned “October Surprise” we cannot rule out the effect of dirty tricks and suspect vote tampering as we saw in 2000 and 2004.

We just had a case of a “dirty trick” here in California. Tan Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant, is a Republican candidate trying to unseat Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, a popular Mexican-American. It appears that Nguyen’s campaign office mailed out a letter to an estimated 14,000 Democratic voters in central Orange County. Written in Spanish, the letter threatened immigrants with jail time if they voted in the upcoming election. In fact, naturalized immigrants are indeed able to vote.

It’s now four years since Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, yet eight states are still not in compliance. The Act itself is flawed, as it seems to mandate the use of electronic voting machines - the very source of some of the problems in the 2000 election. As 15 states use electronic voting machines that have no paper trail to verify disputed tallies, there is a lot of opportunity for undetectable fraud.

Last month, a researcher in Princeton took one minute to hack into a Diebold voting machine. Hmm.