For Australians, many features of US election administration must seem peculiar. Even for national polls, US elections are administered on the local, not even state, level, with up to 14,000 different electoral jurisdictions each using different types of ballots, different voting machines and different voting rules. In most electoral jurisdictions, election administrators are openly partisan with an allegiance to the Democratic or Republican Party. Not only is voting not mandatory, enrolment, called registration, is the responsibility of the voter, not the state.Hasen's article documents a whole host of un-Democratic scandals besetting the USA (who, let us not forget, frequently go to war to "spread" their ideas of "Freem" and "Moxy"). More at his blog, www.electionlawblog.org.
The Florida 2000 debacle, in which the fate of the US presidency was determined by whether and how to count partially perforated punch-card ballots, should have taught the US to emulate Australia's professionalised, non-partisan, and nationalised system of election administration. But instead, the US has gone in the opposite direction...
January 22, 2008
A Wierd Mob
From Richard L. Hasen at The Canberra Times:
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2 comments:
Gandhi, you need to manage your blogpost flow better. I turn my head for a second after not seeing you post anything new over the weekend, and all of a sudden there are like 50 new posts/links here and on HowardOut. I find much new info in the things you post, but it's too much to digest at once. Plus, I've been spending a lot more time scanning the economics blogs and their links. The implosion might be on, mate -- we may well be in October 1929 RIGHT AT THIS FUCKING MOMENT!
I don't usually have time to blog over the weekend much, although I was hoping to write something about Bobby Fischer, a true American Hero who passed away in Iceland after being hounded to his death by Bush & Co.
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