Word: voting
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...good gauge for potential electoral trouble in Florida - the level of lawyer activity - doesn't seem to forecast a tropical vote storm. Mind you, the lawyers are out in force, as they always are here, but they aren't yet expecting a major fight. "I don't think there is anything that is visible at this time that we can anticipate would be materially contestable," says Barry Richard, the Tallahassee attorney who represented Bush during the 2000 recount but isn't representing any side this time. (Richard, ironically, is a lifelong Democrat who is voting for Obama.) "Florida could...
...second," he says. With a massive turnout crucial to his calculus of the big victory that his strategists now believe to be tantalizingly close, Obama is delivering a tutorial on election mechanics at nearly every stop, exhorting people to get to the polls and vote - even if it means, as it has in early voting in Ohio, that they have to stand in line for hours to do it. "If you're in line by 5 o'clock, they've got to let you vote," he told an estimated 60,000 supporters at a rally in front of the Statehouse...
Since the country's colonial days, concerns of voter fraud have inspired ever-more complicated ways to cast one's ballot. Depending on where you live, you may vote tomorrow with a lever, a punch card, a marker or a touchscreen. As election scholar Andrew Gumbel notes, the U.S. has been both a "living experiment in the expansion of democratic rights" and a "world-class laboratory for vote suppression and election-stealing techniques...
...word ballot comes from the Italian word for small ball, ballotta, evoking the bygone practice of using colored shells or beads to cast votes. (The dreaded black ball indicated a "No" vote in ancient Greece). Early American ballots, on the other hand, mostly came in the form of one's voice. Men simply shouted their choice in public, a process known as vica voce. Though it alleviated concerns of illiteracy, the method encouraged intimidation and fraud. One of the most common forms of manipulation involved plying voters with free booze. Even Thomas Jefferson let his campaign dispense liquor on Election...
...Corruption also plagued paper ballots. For the better part of the 19th century they were more likely to be destroyed or manipulated than counted. In 1850's New York, party chieftain Boss Tweed used "floaters" to vote at several polling places across the city, "repeaters" to visit the same polling place more than once, and "plug-uglies" (thugs from Baltimore) to intimidate voters all over the city. The fake voters exploited the names of children, the deceased, even fictional characters. In 1869, 21-year-old Thomas Edison patented the design of a "switch-and-lever" voting machine, but he couldn...