Voting Weirds: Florida Reaches for the Shredder

Does anyone else have this odd thought that nothing will symbolise our times so much in future as - the shredder? Think about it. It's today's secular confessional - you shovel the paper trail of your sins into the grey plastic maw, hit the button and a few seconds later, you are shriven. Unlike the old-line confessional, that wanted you to stop sinning, this one is nonjudgmental. Postmodern, you could almost say. George Bush's team place great value on the notion of being born again, so it was no wonder that, when it all came crashing down, Enron's head office was sometimes ringed by trucks hired from mass-shredding companies. (Personal note: not far from where I live, a ShredFast Document Destruction truck parks up every night after a hard day's shredding. I wonder if I ought to follow it one morning..) God alone knows what's already been shredded on the volley of subsequent scandals.

Now, have a look at this report from Blackboxvoting.org out in the field: Kos

"Then, voting integrity advocates from Volusia and Broward, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office. So, we compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given to us, unsigned, and we found several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.

So, Kathleen went to the car and got the polling place tapes we had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.

This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there told us that bag was destined for the shredder.

By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge us extra for the time we took looking at the real stuff they had withheld from us in our FOIA. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server."

Well, I never. Burning the files is passe. Eating the documents gets to be a big job. Shredding is now.

Oh yeah, and someone obviously forgot to shred: Kos, original report.

"The unmarked brown box sat unnoticed in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections office until Monday, two weeks after the election, when an employee cleaning a desk stumbled upon it.

Inside were 268 uncounted absentee ballots."