Wednesday, July 28, 2004

More E-Voting Scariness / Fox News

Looks like a couple of computer crashes erased all the votes cast on touch-screen voting machines in Miami-Dade county in a 2002 election. Also see Krugman on the topic (via Abstract Factory). Let's hope that as many election officials as possible get a clue before November and we don't have some incredible scandal because of these machines.

So AJ and I were finishing up our workouts last night, and we caught Ron Reagan speaking at the Democratic National Convention about stem cell research. The channel was Fox News, and after the speech they switched to some analysis hosted by Brit Hume. He immediately mentions an email that he (along with other journalists) had just received from the Bush campaign, declaring that Bush had more than doubled funding for stem cell research. I don't have the time to deconstruct all the misleading crap on that page, for example the suggestion that $25 million is somehow a large amount of money to dedicate to a promising research area. But it's nice to know that the Bush campaign has a direct channel to have their responses to convention speeches repeated verbatim by "neutral" reporters on national TV. I wonder how many Kerry campaign press releases Fox News will be reading during the Republican National Convention.

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