Diapers and Thorazine Comped by Theresa Lepore
This is hilarious
Drudge links to a story that says the famous Palm Beach County Presidential Shell-Shock Brigade is now holding group therapy sessions over the Bush victory. Until now, I thought fainting Kerry fanboi Vincent D’Onofrio had the smallest cullions of any living mammal, but I guess I stand corrected.
Remember these idiots? They were so devastated, they ran to a shrink while the chads were still hanging. I thought they’d blow off a little steam and go home, but it looks like they plan to continue their collective tantrum well into the new year.
Okay, what is today? The THIRD OF DECEMBER. When were the election results announced? The SECOND OF NOVEMBER. How long have normal people who are not total wussies been getting over it and getting on with their lives? TWENTY-NINE DAYS. God built the WORLD in SIX.
This is why no one takes the Democrats seriously any more. The Democrats used to be the party of fairly sane blue-collar types who were worried about things like whether the goverment would send goons with clubs to break up their union meetings. Now the party is controlled by a bunch of far-left pants-wetting freaks who want to ban meat and impose forced registration for every citizen who owns a penis. And the limp-wristed loons currently rebirthing each other up in Palm Beach are excellent examples.
The quack running the show, Robert J. Gordon of the American Health Association, says, “It’s no joke. People with PEST [Post-Election Selection Trauma] were traumatized by the election. If you even mention religion, their faces turn blister-red as they shout at Bush.” I guess the party of little brown people has been taken over by little red-faced people.
I have some comforting words for these ninnies. Here’s a little therapy for you. You PANSIES. You snivelling PUNKS. You gutless, spineless sacks of limp tofu custard. Has anything REALLY bad ever happened to you in your worthless LIVES? I wish George Patton would come back to life and slap the snot out of you.
I wonder if ol’ Doc Gordon would mind selling me a DVD of the therapy sessions. Come on, you know it’s pants-crapping funny. A bunch of tie-dyed simpletons primal-screaming while curled in the fetal position on giant Wee-Wee Pads™? That beats the Stooges any day.
I wonder how seriously Doc Gordon takes PEST when he’s having a smoke in the staff lounge. He probably spends his time knocking back Margaritas and making up better acronyms, like Post-Election Neurotic Imbecile Syndrome and Acute Selection-Subsequent Hysterical Assmonkey Trauma. Or how about Profitable Election Sucker Therapy?
I swear to God, it’s enough to make me pay Phoenix University for an online counseling degree and apply for a job.
PATIENT: Doc, I feel like it’s the end of democracy in America.
DR. STEVE: You bet your sweet ass it is, Mr. Wimbish. Any day now, the digital brownshirts are going to strap their Lugers on over their pajamas, march into your gated community here at Vista Del Mierda and confiscate your Metamucil. But fear not. As your therapist, I think I can help you with some guided imagery.
PATIENT: Oh, I’ll try anything, Doc.
DR. STEVE: Okay, lean back and close your eyes and imagine yourself on a peaceful little island. You’re all alone, the sun is shining, the seagulls are calling…off in the distance, you can hear the surf gently breaking…you’re doing something you really love. What are you doing, Mr. Wimbish?
PATIENT: I’m admiring a beautiful government-sponsored Mapplethorpe photo of a bullwhip hanging out of a man’s anus.
DR. STEVE: Fantastic. You feel at ease. You’re safe. Martin Sheen is in the White House, signing a bill that will make the United States a French possession.
PATIENT: Doc…I’m sorting my garbage in the nude. Oh, Doc, it’s bliss.
DR. STEVE: But Mr. Wimbish…what’s that rustling sound in the grass behind you?
PATIENT: An endangered owl, digging a burrow?
DR. STEVE: NO, MR. WIMBISH, IT’S KARL ROVE! AND YOU‘LL NEVER GUESS WHO’S WITH HIM! IT’S THE WHOLE CREW FROM “UP WITH PEOPLE”! THEY‘RE SINGING “GOD BLESS AMERICA” AND WAVING PICTURES OF JESUS WEARING A GESTAPO UNIFORM! ROVE HAS AN ASSAULT WEAPON UNDER EACH ARM, MR. WIMBISH! HE’S MACHINE-GUNNING THE OWLS! OH, GOD! OWL GUTS ARE FLYING EVERYWHERE! THEY‘RE LANDING ON YOUR PONYTAIL! HE JUST SOLD THE ISLAND’S OIL RIGHTS TO KEN LAY! CLOUDS ARE APPEARING OVERHEAD! IT’S ACID RAIN, MR. WIMBISH! ACID RAIN, KILLING ALL THE FLOWERS AND EATING YOUR SKIN AND LOOK—IN THE LAGOON—THE FISH ARE ALL GOING TITS-UP! OH, NO, MR. WIMBISH! HERE COMES GEORGE BUSH! HE’S PULLING AT HIS FACE! IT’S COMING OFF, AND UNDERNEATH…MY GOD IT’S JERRY FALWELL!
PATIENT: AUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! [flings self out of twentieth-story window & splats wetly on hood of own BMW]
DR. STEVE: Nurse? Lie down on my desk, pull those knees up, and tell my three o’clock I’ll be a little late.
In conclusion let me say this. Wussies, wussies, wussies. I hope you all end up in a mental ward and can’t get out to vote in 2008.
I’ve already used the CNN exit polling data to demonstrate that “Moral Values” were not, in fact, the deciding factor in the 2004 election. If you looked at the issues most important to voters, National Security and the economy were weighed more heavily than the categories that fall under the heading of “Moral Values” by a ratio of roughly 3-1. Further, if you look at the distribution of votes by people’s ideological compositions- liberal, moderate or conservative- you see that 45% of Bush’s support came from self-described “liberals” or “moderates.” Kerry lost the center, and he was doomed because of it.
Now the Pew Research Center is taking on the conventional wisdom. Pew found that when respondents were given a choice of seven items for their “most important issue,” 27% chose “moral values” and 60% chose something related to National Security or the economy. When the question was open-ended (which Pew defines as “an unprompted verbatim response to an open-ended question”), “moral values” got 14% of people’s first choices and National Security and the Economy combined for 47% of people’s responses. The “other” category jumped from 4% to 31%.
What does this tell us about how voters made up their minds on November 2? “Moral values” were important, to be sure, but not nearly as important as the War on Terrorism, Iraq or the economy. The whole narrative that the media has constructed since the election about not being “in touch” with Red America is therefore a confused and muddled one. Kerry didn’t lose because he was perceived as “out of touch” with people in the fly-over states. He lost because those people didn’t think he would protect the country from terrorists as well as George W. Bush. He lost because Bush convinced more Americans that he could improve their economic lot than Kerry did.
It won’t hurt the Democrats to speak in more moralistic terms, but they shouldn’t simply pander to religious groups. The Democrats of the 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s (an era of unquestioned Democratic dominance) spoke not in terms of “faith,” but in terms of “right” and “wrong.” Reinhold Nhiebur was their guiding philosopher. The Democrats of today- and no one embodies this more than Kerry- equivocate and speak in shades of gray. Bush is certainly not an equivocator, and that was enough to get him re-elected- despite so many obvious short comings.
I can think of very few Democrats these days who can articulate “right” from “wrong” on foreign policy issues and still be taken seriously. Joe Biden comes to mind and Joe Lieberman does as well. Neither of these men- for very different reasons- could win a Presidential election, but the next Democrat who does win one will do so by co-opting their rhetoric and, more importantly, by adopting their ideas.
Cross-posted at Mayflower Hill.
John Kerry was a terrible candidate who did everything wrong, a real Michael Dukakis version 2.0. In fact, Kerry ran such a poor campaign that I think we in the GOP should examine the Kerry campaign and try to learn from it, so we don’t make the same mistakes. With that in mind, here are what I believe were the top eleven reasons why John Kerry lost the election…
I’m Talking ‘Bout The Man John Kerry Sees In The Mirror: Put simply, John Kerry is an awful candidate for the Presidency in almost every way imaginable. He’s a dovish Massachusetts liberal who originally made a name for himself as an anti-war protestor, he has a mediocre Senate career, and JFK isn’t especially charismatic or likable. The fact that the Democrats chose this stiff in the first place was bad enough, but when you consider that the general consensus after the Democratic primaries was that Kerry was the most “electable” candidate in the field, you have to go, “Whoa, just what were these people thinking”?
Vietnam Part 1: Could You Shut Up About Vietnam Already? One of the poorest decisions the Kerry campaign made was to try to make John Kerry’s Vietnam experience the centerpiece of their campaign. While Americans certainly admire military service, it’s not enough to carry someone to the presidency. That should have been obvious to everyone given that Bill Clinton beat George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole.
Moreover, how Kerry thought he could go though an entire presidential campaign running as a war hero without the public ever being truly informed about some of the despicable things he did while he was protesting the war is beyond me. It would be like running Mike Tyson for President because he was heavyweight boxing champ of the world and expecting that the time he bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear would never come up. It just doesn’t work that way.
Vietnam Part 2: Friendly Fire The Swift Boat Vets for Truth spent all of August savaging John Kerry and they continued to hammer away, albeit not as effectively as they did initially, until the end of the campaign. And the damage they did to Kerry’s likability ratings, particularly among veterans, was significant. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that had the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth not come along, John Kerry might have been the 44th President of the United States.
The conventional wisdom among Democrats today is that Kerry was too slow to respond to the Swifties, but the real problem is that Kerry was never able to mount an effective response. Kerry didn’t release his military records, spent more than a month dodging press conferences, and to the best of my knowledge never personally tried to refute any of the charges against him.
That’s despite the fact that the campaign had to do major backtracking about Kerry’s mythical trip to Cambodia and how he behaved in the battle in which he received his bronze star. This is an issue that SHOULD HAVE been brought up and explored during the Democratic primaries and the fact that it only became a big issue in August of this year, after it had been talked about incessantly on talk radio and the net, gives you an idea of what lapdogs for Kerry the mainstream media were this year.
A Pretty Smile & A Great Head Of Hair Do Not A VP Make: At the time he was picked, John Edwards seemed like about as good of a choice as anybody Kerry could have selected short of John McCain. But, Edwards turned out to be a dud — a pretty dud with a great head of hair mind you — but a dud nonetheless. Edwards was beneath the media radar practically from the time he was chosen onward, only surfacing to get schooled by Dick Cheney in the VP debate and to produce the most ridiculous quote of the entire campaign,
“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is President, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
While elections don’t generally hinge on the selection of a VP, I‘m sure Kerry wishes he would have at least selected someone who could carry his own state.
Convention Of The Damned!: Ok, maybe that title is overdoing it a little, but the Democrats’ fake dog and pony show of a convention was a major failure that barely boosted Kerry in the polls at all.
Part of the problem was that the Democratic Party lacks star power these days. Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Howard Dean, Max Cleland, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton? This is not a group of people in whose hands you want to place your political life.
On top of that, the convention was bland, wasn’t heavy on the issues, was free of attacks on Bush, centered entirely too much on Vietnam, and featured a stunningly dull, yet long speech by Kerry in which he barely even discussed his 20 years in the Senate.
This was a golden opportunity squandered and Kerry’s campaign never truly recovered from it.
I’m Against Gay Marriage — Sort Of: While John Kerry did say he thought marriage was between a man and woman, most people sensed he was at best straddling the fence on the issue. That’s because Kerry didn’t support a Constitutional Amendment to protect marriage, he wasn’t for any of the 11 state bans on gay marriage that were on ballots across the country, and he had little to say to those in his party who insisted that anyone who was against gay marriage was a backwards homophobe.
Well, when you get on the wrong side of 5,000 years of human history, you’re going to turn a lot of people off. Bill Clinton understood that and told Kerry to back the local bans on gay marriage, but Kerry chose not to take Clinton’s advice and paid for it at the polls.
I’ll Take Dick Cheney’s Daughter Is A Lesbian For $1000 Alex!: After John Edwards went off on a tangent about Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary being a lesbian in their debate, it drew a lot of attention. In fact, when Saturday Night Live did a parody of the debate, that’s something even they focused on extensively.
So when John Kerry brought it up AGAIN in his third debate with George Bush, it stood out like a sore thumb. People perceived it, quite correctly I might add, as an attempt by Kerry to use Dick Cheney’s daughter against him — the idea being to appeal to homophobes who Kerry thought might vote for him if they knew Dick Cheney’s daughter was a lesbian. As John Kerry found out to his dismay, going after the other guy’s child is not something the public generally appreciates.
When Kerry made his remark, it didn’t seem like the big quip that everyone would be talking about later, but past debates have often hinged on exactly such small turns of phrase. In this case, it stopped the momentum Kerry had been building by winning all three debates and left him a couple of points behind Bush in the polls, where he essentially stayed for the rest of the election.
Flip-Flop? I got Your Flip-Flop Right Here! Look, all politicians change their minds about certain issues. But Kerry’s positions on the issues seemed to depend almost on who he was talking to, especially when it came to the war. We’re talking about a guy here who said it was the “right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein” but that it was the “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time,” that we’d be “better off without Saddam Hussein” before the war & that we shouldn’t have invaded afterwards, and who claimed Iraq was “critical to” & also a “distraction from” the war on terror.
If you want to be President of the United States, especially during a war, you’ve got to be willing to take a firm stand on the major issues. John Kerry never did.
War, Domestic Issues, & Shrum: This is going to be hard for a lot of liberals to accept, but from day one, John Kerry never had the slightest chance of being competitive with George Bush on security issues. Bush is a hawkish conservative who led the country through 9/11, knocked off Saddam and the Taliban, and wrapped up 2/3rds of Al-Qaeda’s leadership among other things. The idea that a dovish liberal, who wasn’t a cold warrior, who voted against the Gulf War, and who voted not to fund the war in Iraq was going to beat George Bush on security issues was pure fantasy. Yet, the Kerry campaign focused incessantly on national security which ironically helped to convince voters that it was the most important issue of the campaign. Why did the Kerry campaign try to keep picking a fight that they could never win? Someone ask Bob Shrum because I don’t have an explanation.
Why Did Kerry Want To Be President? Who Knows?: Like him or hate him, people had a pretty good idea of why George Bush wanted to be President. He wanted to continue to fight the war on terror, to make his tax cuts permanent, and to amend the Constitution to protect marriage.
Now, why did John Kerry want to be President? No one’s really sure, but I think it had something or another to do with Vietnam. The Kerry campaign didn’t center the campaign around any big issues, instead they simply latched on to whatever the issue of the moment was and that just wasn’t enough for the voters. At some point, John Kerry needed to give people some compelling reasons to vote for him and not just against George Bush, but Kerry wasn’t up to the task.
It’s The Lawyers Stupid!: I firmly believe that in 2002 and 2004, all the talk by Democrats about bringing in hordes of lawyers to “make sure every vote is counted” has ironically cost them a lot of swing votes.
Americans absolutely HATED the contested election of 2000, they loathe the idea of lawyers being involved in the process at all, and they find the concept of a candidate trying to win in the court room after failing at the ballot box to be repulsive. By so publicly “lawyering up,” John Kerry undoubtedly turned off a lot of potential voters and helped to give Bush a little boost right before people went to the polls.
John Kerry was a terrible candidate who did everything wrong, a real Michael Dukakis version 2.0. In fact, Kerry ran such a poor campaign that I think we in the GOP should examine the Kerry campaign and try to learn from it, so we don’t make the same mistakes. With that in mind, here are what I believe were the top eleven reasons why John Kerry lost the election…
I’m Talking ‘Bout The Man John Kerry Sees In The Mirror: Put simply, John Kerry is an awful candidate for the Presidency in almost every way imaginable. He’s a dovish Massachusetts liberal who originally made a name for himself as an anti-war protestor, he has a mediocre Senate career, and JFK isn’t especially charismatic or likable. The fact that the Democrats chose this stiff in the first place was bad enough, but when you consider that the general consensus after the Democratic primaries was that Kerry was the most “electable” candidate in the field, you have to go, “Whoa, just what were these people thinking”?
Vietnam Part 1: Could You Shut Up About Vietnam Already? One of the poorest decisions the Kerry campaign made was to try to make John Kerry’s Vietnam experience the centerpiece of their campaign. While Americans certainly admire military service, it’s not enough to carry someone to the presidency. That should have been obvious to everyone given that Bill Clinton beat George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole.
Moreover, how Kerry thought he could go though an entire presidential campaign running as a war hero without the public ever being truly informed about some of the despicable things he did while he was protesting the war is beyond me. It would be like running Mike Tyson for President because he was heavyweight boxing champ of the world and expecting that the time he bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear would never come up. It just doesn’t work that way.
Vietnam Part 2: Friendly Fire The Swift Boat Vets for Truth spent all of August savaging John Kerry and they continued to hammer away, albeit not as effectively as they did initially, until the end of the campaign. And the damage they did to Kerry’s likability ratings, particularly among veterans, was significant. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that had the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth not come along, John Kerry might have been the 44th President of the United States.
The conventional wisdom among Democrats today is that Kerry was too slow to respond to the Swifties, but the real problem is that Kerry was never able to mount an effective response. Kerry didn’t release his military records, spent more than a month dodging press conferences, and to the best of my knowledge never personally tried to refute any of the charges against him.
That’s despite the fact that the campaign had to do major backtracking about Kerry’s mythical trip to Cambodia and how he behaved in the battle in which he received his bronze star. This is an issue that SHOULD HAVE been brought up and explored during the Democratic primaries and the fact that it only became a big issue in August of this year, after it had been talked about incessantly on talk radio and the net, gives you an idea of what lapdogs for Kerry the mainstream media were this year.
A Pretty Smile & A Great Head Of Hair Do Not A VP Make: At the time he was picked, John Edwards seemed like about as good of a choice as anybody Kerry could have selected short of John McCain. But, Edwards turned out to be a dud — a pretty dud with a great head of hair mind you — but a dud nonetheless. Edwards was beneath the media radar practically from the time he was chosen onward, only surfacing to get schooled by Dick Cheney in the VP debate and to produce the most ridiculous quote of the entire campaign,
“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is President, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
While elections don’t generally hinge on the selection of a VP, I‘m sure Kerry wishes he would have at least selected someone who could carry his own state.
Convention Of The Damned!: Ok, maybe that title is overdoing it a little, but the Democrats’ fake dog and pony show of a convention was a major failure that barely boosted Kerry in the polls at all.
Part of the problem was that the Democratic Party lacks star power these days. Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Howard Dean, Max Cleland, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton? This is not a group of people in whose hands you want to place your political life.
On top of that, the convention was bland, wasn’t heavy on the issues, was free of attacks on Bush, centered entirely too much on Vietnam, and featured a stunningly dull, yet long speech by Kerry in which he barely even discussed his 20 years in the Senate.
This was a golden opportunity squandered and Kerry’s campaign never truly recovered from it.
I’m Against Gay Marriage — Sort Of: While John Kerry did say he thought marriage was between a man and woman, most people sensed he was at best straddling the fence on the issue. That’s because Kerry didn’t support a Constitutional Amendment to protect marriage, he wasn’t for any of the 11 state bans on gay marriage that were on ballots across the country, and he had little to say to those in his party who insisted that anyone who was against gay marriage was a backwards homophobe.
Well, when you get on the wrong side of 5,000 years of human history, you’re going to turn a lot of people off. Bill Clinton understood that and told Kerry to back the local bans on gay marriage, but Kerry chose not to take Clinton’s advice and paid for it at the polls.
I’ll Take Dick Cheney’s Daughter Is A Lesbian For $1000 Alex!: After John Edwards went off on a tangent about Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary being a lesbian in their debate, it drew a lot of attention. In fact, when Saturday Night Live did a parody of the debate, that’s something even they focused on extensively.
So when John Kerry brought it up AGAIN in his third debate with George Bush, it stood out like a sore thumb. People perceived it, quite correctly I might add, as an attempt by Kerry to use Dick Cheney’s daughter against him — the idea being to appeal to homophobes who Kerry thought might vote for him if they knew Dick Cheney’s daughter was a lesbian. As John Kerry found out to his dismay, going after the other guy’s child is not something the public generally appreciates.
When Kerry made his remark, it didn’t seem like the big quip that everyone would be talking about later, but past debates have often hinged on exactly such small turns of phrase. In this case, it stopped the momentum Kerry had been building by winning all three debates and left him a couple of points behind Bush in the polls, where he essentially stayed for the rest of the election.
Flip-Flop? I got Your Flip-Flop Right Here! Look, all politicians change their minds about certain issues. But Kerry’s positions on the issues seemed to depend almost on who he was talking to, especially when it came to the war. We’re talking about a guy here who said it was the “right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein” but that it was the “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time,” that we’d be “better off without Saddam Hussein” before the war & that we shouldn’t have invaded afterwards, and who claimed Iraq was “critical to” & also a “distraction from” the war on terror.
If you want to be President of the United States, especially during a war, you’ve got to be willing to take a firm stand on the major issues. John Kerry never did.
War, Domestic Issues, & Shrum: This is going to be hard for a lot of liberals to accept, but from day one, John Kerry never had the slightest chance of being competitive with George Bush on security issues. Bush is a hawkish conservative who led the country through 9/11, knocked off Saddam and the Taliban, and wrapped up 2/3rds of Al-Qaeda’s leadership among other things. The idea that a dovish liberal, who wasn’t a cold warrior, who voted against the Gulf War, and who voted not to fund the war in Iraq was going to beat George Bush on security issues was pure fantasy. Yet, the Kerry campaign focused incessantly on national security which ironically helped to convince voters that it was the most important issue of the campaign. Why did the Kerry campaign try to keep picking a fight that they could never win? Someone ask Bob Shrum because I don’t have an explanation.
Why Did Kerry Want To Be President? Who Knows?: Like him or hate him, people had a pretty good idea of why George Bush wanted to be President. He wanted to continue to fight the war on terror, to make his tax cuts permanent, and to amend the Constitution to protect marriage.
Now, why did John Kerry want to be President? No one’s really sure, but I think it had something or another to do with Vietnam. The Kerry campaign didn’t center the campaign around any big issues, instead they simply latched on to whatever the issue of the moment was and that just wasn’t enough for the voters. At some point, John Kerry needed to give people some compelling reasons to vote for him and not just against George Bush, but Kerry wasn’t up to the task.
It’s The Lawyers Stupid!: I firmly believe that in 2002 and 2004, all the talk by Democrats about bringing in hordes of lawyers to “make sure every vote is counted” has ironically cost them a lot of swing votes.
Americans absolutely HATED the contested election of 2000, they loathe the idea of lawyers being involved in the process at all, and they find the concept of a candidate trying to win in the court room after failing at the ballot box to be repulsive. By so publicly “lawyering up,” John Kerry undoubtedly turned off a lot of potential voters and helped to give Bush a little boost right before people went to the polls.
I’d like to know if this eVoting system is used already, and if someone can point out flaws:
It’s a two step process.
The voter first fills out a normal paper ballot using some standard technique: filling in circles, connecting arrows, etc.
Then they walk over to a scanner with a monitor and insert the ballot into the scanner. The monitor displays their selections. If the voter sees everything is OK, they press “OK” and the ballot is ejected from the machine. The monitor (or keyboard) only has two choices: “OK” and “Cancel.” The voter can’t use the scanner/monitor to change their votes, they can only accept or reject the selections shown. If the voter chooses “OK”, the voter then puts that ballot into an envelope and puts that envelope into the ballot box.
Poll workers make sure no one can put a ballot into the ballot box without first putting it through the scanner; perhaps the ballot could be marked by the scanner with a mark identifying the exact machine but not using a sequential number that could be used to identify the voter.
The scanner records a preliminary count which stands as the official count unless something unexpected happens. A memory card in the scanner is physically transported to a central tabulator and the votes are read and published. The scanner would not have a modem. (Someone switching in a fake memory card here would need to be addressed in some way).
Random samples of precincts are done to ensure that the machines worked OK and the data on the memory card(s) from that precinct matches the votes on the physical ballots.
There would be a possible series of random samples of widening sizes, depending on errors found. If, in the first random sample no errors are found, then the preliminary count is assumed to be correct. However, if a certain percentage of problems are found, then a larger sample is taken. At some point, the whole state would be recounted if enough problems are found in the preceding samples. When doing a sample, the physical ballots would be counted by hand using a group of observers from all major parties.
In the case of a recount, the physical ballots are counted and they take precedence over the electronic count.
If, during the voting procedure, the voter says the scanner’s output doesn’t match how they voted (i.e., they press “Cancel”), that ballot is placed in a special bin, perhaps together with a note about the specific discrepancy. Then, the voter is given a completely new ballot and has to go through the process from the beginning. These “canceled” ballots could be inspected later to investigate problems or to correct flaws in the system.
If enough voters notice discrepancies, then we have first warning of a problem with that scanner or the ballot or other things.
The election’s been over for almost a week, so I think it’s time to look back at what lead to the Kerry landslide:
Bush answered with an excuse: “Bob, we relied upon a company out of England to provide about half of the flu vaccines for the United States citizen…”
Kerry responded by bringing up that it appears the flu vaccine shortage was due to FDA incompetence. And, he said that under his administration he’d make sure that everyone knew they had to do their job or they’d get fired. He also discussed things like he would be open to all forms of input, even if was something that he didn’t want to hear. And, he forcefully said he wouldn’t try to blame-shift.
What’s that you say? Kerry did none of those things? Oh.
James Wilson takes space in the WSJ to note that he, too, doesn’t think John Kerry lost on values.
It is easy to explain the election. Too easy. Depending on your instincts and how much time you are given to think, you can say that the electorate has moved to the right or that John Kerry flip-flopped or that the Democrats were unable to appeal to the moral values of people. Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that President Bush was re-elected by people who disagree with him on what America should be. His evidence is that “Christian fundamentalists” have used their “religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad.” Garry Wills has said much the same thing.These explanations are wide of the mark. The nation did not undergo a rightward shift in 2004 any more than it had when it elected Reagan in 1980 and re-elected him in 1984. The policy preferences of Americans are remarkably stable, a fact that has been confirmed by virtually every scholar who has looked at the matter.