Every. Vote. Should. Count

May 30, 2008

Just finished watching Recount on HBO.  Excellent, excellent film, and I highly recommend it.  I followed a lot of what was going on in Florida in 2000, and even more so in 2004 while living there.  Even got offered the chance of examining an electronic voting machine in 2005 for security issues, but that’s another story for some later time.

Leaving aside the republican / democrat issues, the thing that pissed me off the most with the story the film told was the lengths that were taken to not count every vote.  Watching the film I believe that the sub-message that was trying to get out was "make sure this doesn’t happen again" (even though it did, but in a different way, in 2004).

I’ll be watching in November with anticipation on how "fair" this election actually is.  It’s really troublesome that the USA is telling the rest of the world that it could get it’s democracy in order, despite it being clear that it can’t keep it’s own house straight.  I wouldn’t care which party wins in the end (although personally I have very strong leanings towards Obama, but doesn’t matter because I can’t vote in the nationals yet as not a citizen), but when it comes down to it every vote should be counted.  How difficult can it really be? As it turns out, very – perhaps the USA should go back to the "cross on a bit of paper" that us Brits are so used to.

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