Got Democracy?

Today's front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that San Diego has run out of absentee ballots. The Registrar of Voters cites "unusually high demand and a printing order that wasn't filled fast enough." Now someone is making 5,000 photocopies because Diebold (yes, they) didn't fill the printing order in time.

As if our democracy wasn't already under siege. As if I wasn't already worried my vote—and yours, and yours, and yours—would be either miscounted or tampered with by those in power.

Haven't you heard? Even upstanding, righteous, bastions of patriotism and conservative moral values are doing it: Ann Coulter is under investigation for Florida vote fraud. The same woman who called me treasonous.

Haven't you heard? The 130,000 Diebold electronic voting machines preparing for November 7th can be—and have been—hacked and the "ballots" reversed. Not just changed: reversed. Those who can do it describe it as easy. Someone even sent the source-code from the 2004 elections, in an anonymous package, to a Maryland legislator.

And we can't even get the absentee ballots right.

The photocopied versions are to be returned by likely confused voters, whose votes will then be transferred by hand to new ballots which are (supposedly) being printed. Am I the only one rolling my eyes? I'd sure like to know what kind of oversight will be taking place during this transfer process.

I'll say it here first if it hasn't already been said. If the Democratic congressional landslide predicted by every poll from coast to coast doesn't come to fruition late on November 7th, it will mean someone under Karl Rove's employ has committed voter fraud on a scale that would make even Ms. Coulter blush. Bush and Rove have both said Democratic Party control of the House or Senate "won't happen."

Now, how do they know that?