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Talkback
Paper trailWho knows, who can know, how many electronic ballots might have been flipped by the Diebold voting machines? Without a paper trail, like a cash register receipt, election officials cannot verify and validate the count. Flipping between 1 and 2 percent of the votes would be enough to produce the apparent results. And Diebold's president is one of George W. Bush's deepest supporters. If any good can come from this election, let it be new regulations to ensure fair, verifiable vote counting. Bruce Joffe
The blogs and the mediaThe Republican-controlled news media is blaming bloggers for reporting early that John Kerry had won the election. As a blogger, I find that amusing, because we got our information from pollsters like John Zogby who announced the day before the election that Kerry was going to win by a landslide. We also got our information from the real results of the exit polls that showed Kerry winning by a landslide. Were bloggers like me wrong about what we reported? No – we weren't. The real story now is that with electronic voting on voting machines that are easily hacked, and in states like Ohio where the secretary of state who counts the votes was also the state chair for the George W. Bush campaign, the system is so riddled with fraud that we don't know who really won the election. The real story is that in areas with voting machines that are easily tampered with, that the supposed error in the exit polls is far greater than areas with paper ballots, and the error was all in favor of Bush. But if you want the details of those stories, you won't find that in the mainstream press. You have to get online and read the blogs. Marc Perkel
What machine?I just can't agree with the Bay Guardian's framing of Ross Mirkarimi's defeat of Robert Haaland in this year's supervisor race in District 5 ["What Went Wrong," 11/10/04]. This is the thing that increasingly disturbs me about the progressive movement I've been a part of for the last several years, this tendency to have to create a machine to run against, even if it's not real, even if it's sometimes other marginal groups who didn't side with you this time, even if sometimes those groups were sitting to your left. My last check of the numbers said about 300 people voted the Green Party line, 700 voted the Democratic Party line, and 2,800 voted the Bay Guardian slate. Haaland ran with Mark Leno's, Kamala Harris's, and Tom Ammiano's support; Mirkarimi with Matt Gonzalez's. I have trouble seeing that one of these groups is somehow more institutional. Are the labor, black civil rights, queers, and tenant union activists who worked for Haaland somehow less pure than gonzo campaign staff and Green Party people over at Mirkarimi's? Greg Shaw
After Measure YOakland's Measure Y passed by 3 percent of the vote out of the 100 percent cast. In launching the No on Measure Y campaign, we at Education Not Incarceration (www.ednotinc.org) knew from the beginning that we did not have the resources to fully inform all of the voters nor to run a get-out-the-vote campaign that could reach and turn out sufficient voters to defeat the measure. Instead, we ran a very successful campaign aimed at drawing media attention to the question of whether police and prisons are making our communities safer. Now, as plans are made for the use of Measure Y funds, including the hiring of 63 new police officers, our goals remain the same as when we started the campaign: to significantly influence the debate around crime and true violence prevention, to challenge people to recognize that police and prisons are not making us safer, and to call for the social resources we need to build a safer Oakland. Both democracy and a secure civil society require a strong educational system and just, equitable access to public resources provided for the good of all. This, as so many of our supporters agree, is true violence prevention. Anything less is a band-aid approach at best, and the perpetuation of violence and militarism at worst. Jonah Zern
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