Voting TaKtiX

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ‘’silly on its face.'’ Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ‘’gold standard'’ for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

The whole article is four pages long, appears to be authoritative and, if true, damning. Bush didn’t win the popular vote in 2000, and arguably didn’t win Florida either. If this is correct, he didn’t win in 2004 either, massive election fraud (and we’re talking more than dodgy Diebold machines) secrued an illegitimate victory.

Update:

Rebuttals here and here (via). I suspect there likely was fraud, likely on both sides, but it’s moot. The US needs to refrom its voting procedures though. Big Time.

it is time … to reject the one size fits all model. The very existence of the Eurozone proves that it can be done - and add to that the complex Venn diagram of European relations that brings in the Schengen Agreement, Council of Europe, EFTA and the like, you have the beginnings of a model that everyone could be happy with. A core Europe of Eurozone states who can happily push forward with political and economic integration whenever they please, with various decreasing intensities of membership on the periphery … If the majority of Europe DOESN’T want political unification (which, for the forseeable future, will remain the case), why should that majority prevent the minority of countries that do want closer unification from so doing?

Pretty much agree with him here, I’ve never got the objection to a multi speed Europe, nor understood why France, Germany and BeNeLux can’t create a federation within a greater unit if that’s what they want.

Then again, the Schengen opt out for Britain still makes no sense to me whatsoever either.