November 04, 2004
#269 :: Tennessee Prison Patch
Something about jailhouse workmanship that makes you sit up straight and clear-eyed. It's honest, bone-straight, complete. You can tell it's been made by someone with nothing much to live for. A 25-year-plus trustee or a senior veteranoYou find this patch - one of half a dozen tossed into a cardboard box half along with other paramilitary patches. The other five Tennessee Department of Correction arm patches there are throwaways - errors, you realize, that were fobbed off on this military surplus store because the inmate running the sewing machine botched them on the line. Five fuckups - bad stitching, misspelled mottos abandoned mid-phrase, bungled logos (plough and wheat sheaf, barge and river bleeding into each other in a ruined fuzz of canary-yellow thread) - and one perfect patch. I grabbed this one, and later wonder why I didn't take one of the mistakes, which would have proved more interesting.
I got into it today over a radical-right religious demagogue, who was spouting off at the L.A. Times about the need to erase the "evils" of liberal ideology. I wish I'd been a bit more articulate, less rushed in my thoughts. But a hot needle of anger still goads me to jump up and charge around with my chin out, and there's no telling when that impulse will subside.
This has made me even angrier: There is potential evidence of massive voter fraud in the states where electronic voting was used. Paper-ballot states saw their tallies match exit poll results pretty closely. E-voting results were skewed away from exit poll results in favor of Bush. It's a pretty simple equation, if you just sit there staring at these graphs of the data.
Of course, I read it on the internets, so it must be true.
Healthy dose of skepticism aside, we'll soon know more, once the brave Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org and those journalists courageous enough to follow her, get done reviewing results from the massive civil records subpoena she made Nov. 2 in the form of a Freedom of Information Act request.
Even if they prove only minor errors that count for nothing in the Big Tally, they're very timely. We have been trusting fools to turn over our voting process to a handful of comptuter-balloting companies that offer no paper record. It's about time to find out how badly we might have placed that mistrust.
Stay bookmarked Sean Bonner)
Posted by mack reed at November 4, 2004 11:33 PM | TrackBack