[lbo-talk] My blog on the elections in Mexico

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Jul 5 11:01:26 PDT 2006


On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, Dwayne Monroe wrote:


> <http://monroelab.net/blog/?p=449>
>
> And by the way, López Obrador's distributed intelligence technique for
> countering fraud was simply brilliant and a model for others (perhaps even
> here within the beast's belly) to follow.

It's definately a model of inspiration (and I sure hope they win!) But besides the suggestion that the internet is a helpful organizing tool, does it really offer us any usable tactics? IIUC, their knockout punch seems to depend on things down south being old fashioned and low tech, i.e., physical tokens that are witnessed and publicly recorded at each local site. But electronic vote shaving would change the local results, so there'd be no comparable discrepency to compare. If we wanted to mount a similar challenge in our country, I'm not sure we could escape the need for centrally organized independent exit polls. Perhaps such a thing could be organized by a purpose built 509 org in conjunction with organizations that routinely mount operations overseas. But there'd be more a lot more to it than what is now going in Mexico -- which looks seems like it's going be a very tough fight even with all those gotcha pictures which we wouldn't have.

BTW, Julio -- thanks for starting up the purpose-built blog! Really meets a need.

Michael



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