I received a number of responses (ok, two, but that’s more than most entries generate) to my idea for revamping the election process. In fairness, Nicole told me about President Match, which identifies the candidate who best matches your position based on your answers to a series of questions about what policies/ideas you favor/oppose.
And no, I didn’t know about this site before I made my recommendation. But I still stand by my idea.
In a few hours, the first polls will open. Millions of people, going about their regular daily lives, will take a few minutes out of their day to record a mark in favor of a set of candidates. Those marks will be tallied, the score will be announced, and a leader will be chosen for the next four years. Someone who, for all intents and purposes, will serve as leader of the free world. And this will take place, with relatively little corruption, with relatively little violence. What in the end is decided will stand.
Despite who wins, the very process astounds me.
I’m going to propose a new voting process, at least for Presidential elections, but eventually to be phased in for all elections.
I recently read a survey from Tennessee that indicate that most voters could not correctly match the candidates with their policy perscriptions. As a result, it’s become clear to me that voters are not actually voting for candidates that they necessarily agree with, and for policies that they may not support. This strikes me as a major failing of democracy. After all, the candidate is less important than the policies that candidate plans to implement.
Therefore, all future ballots should eliminate the actual names of the candidates/policies. Instead, voters will now use a matrix to indicate their favorite issues, such as abortion, gun control, tax cuts, the balanced budget, the war on terrorism, etc., and their position on the issue (i.e. for or against). This will lead to a number between 0 and 100. Where the two candidates positions on an issue are measurabley similar, the issue will not be counted in the final tally, in order to provide us solely with contrasts. Each candidate, in the end, will be based at each end of the spectrum, and whomever has more ballots closer to his/her position based on the distribution wins the election.
This will enable us to move closer to voting on what really matters, the issues.
I have made my decision in the upcoming election fairly clear to anyone who has asked me anything about the election. I’m not shy about stating who I’m planning to vote for or why. But the recent allegations around al Qaaqaa, and the attempted spin by the White House to deny their own responsibility in the matter is simply galling. More info on the Fox spin attempts are available here.
The timeline, as I understand it is relatively well-established, although it may be necessary to wade through multiple stories to see the full picture.
The IAEA had more than 350 metric tonnes of explosives under seal in Iraq, which they monitored over a several year period leading up to the US invasion. These explosives were considered dual-use items, with both non-military (and more specifically, non-WMD) and military purposes. Prior to the invasion, the IAEA pulled out its staff, although they made one last check to ensure that the weapons remained in place under seal up to a week before the invasion. The IAEA also informed the US about the weapons under seal there, and in fact, this had been included in Colin Powell’s UN presentation prior the commencement of the war. Long and short, the US was AWARE of the contents of the facility, meaning ignorance was not an excuse.
On April 3rd to April 4th, US forces passed through al Qaaqaa, but no attempts were made to secure the facility. Some testing was done to attempt to identify if chemical weapons were present, but only more “run-of-the-mill” explosives were found. Offhand reports indicate that the seals were still intact, although no thorough accounting of the inventory was done, to the best of the public’s knowledge.
On April 10th, additional US forces passed through the facility, but again no attempt was made to secure the facility, nor was a thorough accounting of the explosives made at this time. In fact, no real search was carried out, and one of the commanders has publically admitted that to have secured the facility would have required four times the number of troops provided. Additional evidence indicates that the explosives were under seal as late as April 18th, 2003.
Sometime after this, the explosives went missing. Once the Bush Administration was the de facto head of the Iraqi state. And, as far as anyone has admitted publically, no significant effort was made to locate or secure the explosives.
What’s more, the US-run government in Iraq received warning about the missing explosives long before the loss of the explosives was reported to the IAEA. And yet they either informed no one in the White House or no one in the White House card until the Iraqi government informed the IAEA directly, which triggered a process of its own. Furthermore, there was in fact pressure on the Iraqis to not even report the incident at all.
The loss of the explosives is disturbing, as they could be anywhere now, in just about anyone’s hands. But this simply didn’t have to be the case. The Bush Administration KNEW that the weapons were there. They knew before the invasion, they knew during the invasion, and they knew after the invasion. And they did absolutely nothing about it. Until mid-October, 2004, a year and a half later, when the cat was finally let out of the bag. And the weapons had long since vanished.
How anyone could vote for an administration this incompetent is beyond me.
Presidential Election Day is my Superbowl, my World Series. Every election season I follow the candidates, the policies, the spin, the punditry. I read the commentary, listen to the spin, wade through the policy wonks. And it all comes down to the first Tuesday of November. Months of following candidates and their campaigns either suceeds or fails.
I’m tingling in anticipation. Just five more days.
Why? Isn’t it in our best interests for people to raise issues when there’s a concern? Isn’t that how we move forward?
with the election coming down to the wire, it looks as though it’s a good time to commence with a roundup of the latest dirty gop tricks.
The Swift Boat Veterans for [Lies] knew all along their story was bunk, but went ahead with it anyway. The real kicker, of course, is that the waters have been so muddied on this topic that to bring it up again is likely to cause more damage than it’s worth.
The RNC is threatening legal action against the group Rock the Vote, a group that hopes to improve voter turnout among younger voters, for raising the issue of a potential draft and calling for an election-timed debate. Good to know the RNC still supports freedom of speech.
In Tennessee, we have a flyer incident suspicioulsy similar to other incidents in the past, where Karl Rove planned an attack campaign on his own candidate in order to generate sympathy. And there was another instance at the RNC level.
Throw in the resignation of Jim Tobin, the chair of the Bush Cheney New England campaign for his involvement in an illegal phone bank scheme to block Democrats’ Get-Out-the-Vote drives in 2002, along with his deep connections to the head of the Republicans Senate election coordination team, and you have to wonder.
One shouldn’t forget that Sinclair, which owns radio stations in many key swing states, wants to pre-empt regular programming in the week before the election to broadcast Swift Boat propaganda.
Oh, and there were also the relocated Republicans, who resigned from the Bush campaign in South Dakota for some “questionable ballots” (i.e. voter fraud), that now are leading the vote effort for Bush in Ohio.
An in-depth look in to the world of the Republican Party, and why the author’s voting for the Dems in 2004.
Video courtesy of Joi Ito.
The following is the text of an e-mail sent from a Wall Street Journal reporter in Iraq to her friends and family. So far, there’s no question about the authenticity of the e-mail, and no strong denials about the accuracy, either.
9/30/2004
Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Iraq, confirmed that a widely-redistributed letter she emailed to friends about the nightmarish situation in Iraq was indeed written by her. Too bad the WSJ doesn’t allow this reporter to write these kinds of stories for the paper.
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Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.
Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people’s homes and never walk in the streets. I can’t go grocery shopping any more, can’t eat in restaurants, can’t strike a conversation with strangers, can’t look for stories, can’t drive in any thing but a full armored car, can’t go to scenes of breaking news stories, can’t be stuck in traffic, can’t speak English outside, can’t take a road trip, can’t say I’m an American, can’t linger at checkpoints, can’t be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can’t and can’t.
There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.
It’s hard to pinpoint when the turning point exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq’s population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a potential threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to imminent and active threat, a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess the situation. ÊWhen asked how are things? they reply: the situation is very bad.
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn’t control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country’s roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war.
In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health, which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers– has now stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped. He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was supposed to love America for liberating Iraq.
For journalists the significant turning point came with the wave of abduction and kidnappings. Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad because foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways between towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a journalist female friend at 11 p.m. telling me two Italian women had been abducted from their homes in broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded this week and the Brit, were abducted from their homes in a residential neighborhood. They were supplying the entire block with round the clock electricity from their generator to win friends. The abductors grabbed one of them at 6 a.m. when he came out to switch on the generator; his beheaded body was thrown back near the neighborhoods. The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day. The various elements within it — baathists, criminals, nationalists and Al Qaeda — are cooperating and coordinating.
I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the military and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing. ÊHere is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from Al Qaeda to the Baathisst to the criminals. My friend Georges, the French journalist snatched on the road to Najaf, has been missing for a month with no word on release or whether he is still alive.
America’s last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being murdered by the dozens every dayÜover 700 to date — and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly.
As for reconstruction: firstly it’s so unsafe for foreigners to operate that almost all projects have come to a halt. After two years, of the $18 billion Congress appropriated for Iraq reconstruction only about $1 billion or so has been spent and a chuck has now been reallocated for improving security, a sign of just how bad things are going here.
Oil dreams? Insurgents disrupt oil flow routinely as a result of sabotage and oil prices have hit record high of $49 a barrel.
Who did this war exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up and Al Qaeda is running around in Iraq?
Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they’d take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler.
I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.
Then I went to see an Iraqi scholar this week to talk to him about elections here. He has been trying to educate the public on the importance of voting. He said, “President Bush wanted to turn Iraq into a democracy that would be an example for the Middle East. Forget about democracy, forget about being a model for the region, we have to salvage Iraq before all is lost.”
One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it’s hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral.
The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can’t be put back into a bottle.
The Iraqi government is talking about having elections in three months while half of the country remains a no go zone — out of the hands of the government and the Americans and out of reach of journalists. In the other half, the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up at polling stations. The Sunnis have already said they’d boycott elections, leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war.
I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: “Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? ÊAre you joking?”
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