At 07:46 PM 11/7/00 -0800, Tim May wrote:
Late news: Just saw Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri calling for an investigation into "criminal voting fraud" by the Democrat political machine in St. Louis and the lower court judge (if he was appointed by Democrats, the jig's up). Ashcroft faces a very, very, very close election, and that extra blast of welfare roll voters may have been enough to defeat him.
Mighty niggardly of the Democrats, I'd say. Spooky, in fact.
On the other hand, doing a bait&switch on closing times is also going to affect the voting response, especially for people who work late or weird shifts and were planning to vote at 9pm. Also, maybe Tim hasn't voted somewhere new in a while, but this is a polling system run by government bureaucrats, who have a level of enthusiasm and competence for providing high-quality service for inner-city residents that's _much_ different from the quality of service that they provide for rich folks. Sometimes the poll-workers can read and write, and sometimes there are enough poll-workers, and if there's a political machine around, they also know how to count, and what they're counting, and for whom, and what things are important to count accurately, like money, and what things are not important to count accurately, like poor people's votes. When things screw up in an overworked clerical environment, they screw up badly. Somebody I was talking to last night was at the polling place, and the guy in front of her was trying to straighten out the two registrations from the same address, one for John Doe, Democrat, and one for John J. Doe, Republican (no, they weren't father and son, they were the same guy....) That's an easier case for him, at least if he only wants to vote once (:-). And it's much messier when the people are tenants who move a lot. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639