Flutterby™! : Microsoft vote rigging 2002-01-09 18:14:47+00

Microsoft vote rigging

2002-01-09 18:14:47+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Via /.: First it was Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, then it was Wil Wheaton, now Microsoft supporters are engaging in online poll ballot box stuffing, this time with ZDNet UK.

This is not the first time Microsoft has been caught using dubious practices. Last August, lobbyists acting for Microsoft went beyond the grave and dispatched letters to US states' attorneys general from two deceased people as part of a campaign to persuade government prosecutors to lay off the company in the antitrust case. US lobby group the Campaign Against Government Waste (CAGW) posted the letters as part of an attempt to convince attorneys general there was a grass-roots campaign against the case.

But hey, Chicago and Louisiana politicians have been doing that for years.

Actually, ballot stuffing and the Voting Dead and other such tactics haven't been viable in Louisiana since the 1950's. (Yeah, I know it was a joke, but I'm leading to an anecdote myself here.)

When I came up here to Boston I was amazed at how few polling places used voting machines. I mean, there I was growing up in a place Bostonians consider a backwater, right, but Louisiana ALWAYS has voting machines, and here I am in the big bad industrialized Northeast and they are counting paper ballots by hand?

Then one day it hit me, and I checked on it, and sure enough: Louisiana's voting procedures are actually probably some of the most locked-down in the country, precisely BECAUSE it had such an amazing history of ballot-box antics. That's why even the dinkiest polling places in Louisiana usually have voting machines and all sorts of watchdogs and safeguards. The years from 1950 to, say, 1970 were spent closing all the loopholes and tricks, partially to avoid corruption, and partially for civil rights reasons (you fill in that blank yourself).