>Is Michael Pollak, above, suggesting that the gap between exit polls and
>the recorded result, which he says occurred only in Florida, substantially
>due to underpunched ballots? Surely such equipment is also used elsewhere
>in the USA.
the butterfly ballot and punch machine are antiquated, as i understand it, and very few places use the machine. see Redrockeater for more information than you ever wanted to know about the machine, the ballot, its design and other abused/incompetencies that occurred in FL and, likely, in many other places. http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/florida.html
While Doug fired back at Nathan with examples of the abuse of the system by Democrats, those examples were of fraudulent voting; in FL, the situation was one of crafty ways to *prevent* people from voting: stationing officers near polling places (an old southern tradition), road checks, demanding two forms of i.d. when only one was required, poor record keeping practices and, in general, hostility to poor blacks and whites who had registration and i.d. but weren't properly placed on the voting lists. there were also reports of police stopping carpools of blacks heading to polling place. the police asked for taxi licenses! polling places scheduled to be in school buildings that had been torn down three wks prior to the election. there was an incident here in Tampa bay area, a white woman and black man were harassed. she was a producer for local media. she quickly filed a report on the incident, the cops followed her home afterward.
etc.
THIS IS THE SOUTH! (get me outta here! :) inside joke)
some of the above is purposeful harassment of the kind that happened in the old days when "boss" stood at the polling place and watched menacingly while people voted. others are instances of bureaucratic incompetence--the kind that, when you're an articulate middle/upper middle white person, you feel confidant in fighting and demanding that you be allowed to vote, but when when you're poor--black, white, Latino, whatever--you don't feel you can fight.
it is difficult to explain this, the attitudes that are still pervasive here in Florida--there is a way in which white middle class people behave that make it clear that you'd better shut your mouth. i may have archived some old discussions of this from another list--might explain better.
Nathan may be engaging in opportunism. still, the institutionalized practices that now act as barriers to exercising the right to vote are no less problematic. they are a form of structural race/class oppression, yes. making the case that it is, though, is far more difficult than exposing the more manifest infringements of civil rights under Jim Crow, however.
as I've said before, voting is a merely formal right extended to us to legitimate the label "democracy" and its not particularly progressive. and yet, while i wouldn't actively spend a great deal of time on pursuing the avenues Nathan and the Yale group has, I wouldn't denounce it. there is a broader push in the nation supporting Nathan, if i read the opinion polls properly. in that sense, engaging that sentiment and, if you will, pushing it to be more radical and critically self-reflective ought to be a goal. denouncing what Nathan and his colleagues are doing isn't especially productive.
so, again, like others here, the action is in building a social movement on the basis of the energy that is and has been fermenting over the past year and a half or so.