http://www.salon.com/…

It’s far worse than you think — worse than hanging chads, faulty Diebold machines, and billionaires who bankroll last-minute attack ads. The American system for nominating a presidential candidate has about as much in common with actual democracy as Donald Duck has with a lake mallard. It’s not just that this year’s primaries have been further front-loaded, or that the early primary states aren’t representative of the nation at large. There is only passing fairness. There is only the semblance of order. There is nothing like equal representation under the law.

The Electoral College is confusing enough… then the states and the parties make it so much worse. I think the time when the possibility of doing a popular vote was impractical and potentially risky (read the notes from the Constitutional Convention) has passed. I think I’d rather see a instant-runoff system or similar.

The Des Moines Register has reported that two of the Diebold optical scanners failed and 1500 ballots had to be recounted. The Atlantic has reported that it was actually 4500. There were 14,302 votes cast (out of 26,000 tickets sold). So potentially 10.5% or 31.5% of the votes were incorrectly handled. Not terrible reassuring. At this point why not count all of them by hand? It would reassure all those who are skeptical. At least with regards to this poll.

The fact that only 55% of the tickets purchased lead to votes is sortof suspicious. Yes the candidates purchased a lot of tickets but I’ve yet to find anything about how many they gave out so we can compare. 23,000 votes were cast in 1999. Perhaps people are fed up. Perhaps they threw out votes. Without additional information they only promote this conspiracy theory like dialog.