Miasmatic Review

Counting votes.

I’ve never believed in the electronic voting machines being hacked theory that is floating around. It’s just way too big of a conspiracy theory for me to buy. They may be flawed, but I don’t believe they are rigged or hacked. Then again living in Illinois I can’t think of any voting method that isn’t flawed. Hell I live in the same state as Chicago; we all know what they can do with ballots and a large body of water.

Tuesday night I did start to wonder how flawed our polling system is. The polls here closed at 7:00 PM, we didn’t start getting election news/results until around 8:00. By 8:30 you still couldn’t get an accurate picture of how the election was going. Depending on what news source you where looking at, they all give different figures. Three local channels, the local newspaper and two radio stations couldn’t agree on any results. At a little past 9:00 PM one station declared Blagojevich the winner while another station showed Topinka in the lead. The newspaper had a state representative loosing as well as a US congressman, but two of the stations had them both winning. Some races showed really close in one place and on opponent to have a wide lead at others. No two had numbers that even resembled the other sources. It went on this way all night. I finally gave up watching and checking the results because it was frustrating and annoying.

I’m trying to figure out how all of these “reliable” news sources could have widely varying results. I know I’m not that savvy in the ways of how votes are counted and election results reported, but one would think they would have a least a uniform or single point of media release. I’m also wondering how accurate any of the election results actually where.

Yea, that’s another rung in my ladder of lost faith in our government.