I have every confidence my vote will count.

My vote is like a raindrop. You may say it is insignificant but every great flood is made up of individual raindrops

I don’t have total unfailing confidence that my vote will count, but I am hopeful.
If the election occurs and there is no need to scrutinize the voting in my congressional district, I’ll feel better.

No. But I’ll still be out there and voting.

I don’t remener which. But one election was decided by just a little over 500 votes.

Calm down already. Elections in the United States—regardless of what some would leave you to believe—are not stolen. I would not say that voter fraud does not exist, but it happens on both sides and generally is not a final factor and never a factor in nationwide elections.. If you vote, and vote properly, your vote will be counted. By the way, if you live in Florida, please make sure the chad isn’t hanging.

I don’t think my mom is voting for that reason. All the electoral college stuff, she doesn’t feel like her vote matters anyway.

Anyone who doesn’t vote has no right to complain about anything having to do w/ government on any level.

I am confident that my vote will count when it comes to state propositions and people running for offices within our state government.

As far as my vote for a presidential candidate, I’d like to think it holds some weight and I will be out there voting for one of them, but I have my doubts now and again.

I suppose so ( im a bit skeptical about this) . Nevertheless, vote for your fav leader. The coming presidential election race will be very close. You will never know , even one vote counts in this sort of circumstance.

Netflix the movie “Recount” then come back and tell us if you think your vote counts or not.

I live in one of two states that does not award its electoral votes on a “winner take all” basis. I know for an absolute certainty that my vote will make a difference.

My vote will count. It will be one of many, but it will still be one.

I’m fairly confident that my vote will be accounted for, but I’m not particularly confident it will actually “count” in a material way since no one that is running has the wherewithal to make much of a difference unfortunately.

Everyone understands this is not a one-person-one-vote pure democracy. We have a very complex system where we each contribute to the best of our ability. The founding fathers recognized this inequity and dealt with it.

For example, the entire state of Alaska has a population 85% the size of my county and has 3 members in Congress. Although my county is larger we have 1.02 members in Congress and in the electoral college. Beyond that Alaska is 11,000 times bigger than my count with $$$trillions of natural resources that frees the population of much of the tax burden that I carry. Doesn’t seem fair does it? We decided from the beginning that there could never be total equality but that is the price we pay to be one nation. We all have choices though. I could leave one of the most beautiful, cosmopolitan, convenient, comfortable places in the world and move to Alaska (shiver). I happily made that decision,

Does a New Jersey vote count? Not really. Swing states matter. My state: not so much.
But a single vote does get counted in the popular vote, which is interesting to look at, regardless of whether it actually “counts.”

@generalspecific: my mother is the same way. I’m dragging her to the polls anyway, though, whether she wants it or not. I’m 17, so I can’t vote, so I told her if she wants to she can let me pick for her.

I suggest you do the same.

I live in Florida so not so much. I am sure we will screw it up somehow.

@pete- I think I might. but she’ll probably just vote for Nader

My vote will count. I live in Minnesota, we have optical scan and have never had any reports (well not until this week) of any hanky panky that I’m aware of. This week some right wing organization was calling Democratic voters purporting to be from the Secretary of State’s office raising concerns about their registrations. But I’m not worried about that, Minnesota has gone blue every year since ‘72, our Secretary of State is a Democrat and our Republican governor has national aspirations so he wouldn’t be caught dead interfering with the process.

Now I have to put to bed a couple arguments made here by Sueanne Tremendous who is intelligent, but blissfully unaware of the fact that the national US Presidential election in 2000 was stolen. And before you come back with “was not”, please do me a favor and read just the first chapter of a book called “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” by investigative journalist Greg Palast. I won’t dwell on it, but he explains how, in an election that was decided by 200 votes, Republicans managed to invalidate the voter registrations of nearly 200,000 people, overwhelmingly Democrats, resulting in a net of 157,000 Democrat votes lost. They did so by having the Governor (Bush’s brother) and his state campaign manager Katherine Harris (the Secretary of State of Florida) contract with a company called Choice Point Technologies. Choice Point was hired to help “clean up” the voter rolls, namely by removing felons from those rolls, which was 100% legal under Florida law at the time. There were however a few aspects of this purge which were not legal, and this is not a partisan issue…anyone interested in Democracy should be up in arms about this. But instead we were all sold on the idea that it was all about Butterfly Ballots and hanging chads, which I’m happy to report if they are your major concern, Kurt Browning, current SOS of Florida has guaranteed there will not be a single butterfly ballot or hanging chad, as Florida has moved to the aforementioned optical scan system, which is the most reliable voter system I’m aware of.

At any rate, what was illegal about the way the list of registered voters was matched to the list of felons was in how it was done. First and foremost they asked Choice Point to create a matching program that would find a match and remove from the voter rolls anyone who shared the first 2 letters of their first or last names on both lists. So, if John Jackson was a convicted felon, not only did everyone named John Jackson, or Jon Jackson get removed from the roles, so did the Joe Jacksons, the Joe Jacobsons…you get the idea. The next problem was that “somehow” a list of felons in Texas was provided to Choice Point (even though it was commissioned by Florida which had no jurisdiction to use state records from any other state), and Choice Point used those names anyway….how they happened to get the list of Texas felons is a mystery even to their then governor George W. Bush. And the final real problem was that the rolls were only purged in the counties which voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in previous elections (like 80–90% support), there simply were no ‘felons’ removed via Choice Point’s purge in overwhelmingly Republican counties or counties where the vote was evenly split. All of this is documented and proven by Palast. He even had a CD-ROM with the purge spreadsheet, which he brought to the Secretary of State’s office to speak with one of the men in charge of carrying out the purge. Palast had a film crew with him, which caught this official on tape claiming there was no truth to Palast’s story, UNTIL Palast produced the CD-ROM, at which point this official got up out of his chair and ran full bore to an office, inside of which he barricaded himself until security removed Palast and his film crew from the premises. So, don’t tell me an election “can’t” be stolen in America.

And I dispute one other tenet here, that “it happens on both sides”. Well in most things, I agree with this assessment, but it’s hard to buy this argument when it relates to depressing voter turnout when every single story I’ve ever read about trying to keep people from voting has been an example of someone trying to keep Democrats from voting. We’ve already seen in early voting

- Electronic voting machines flipping votes from Obama to McCain in West Virginia and the poll workers being unable to do anything about it
– Calls being placed in Spanish to Democrats in New Mexico telling Hispanic voters that they can register their votes right now over the phone so they don’t have to go in on election day
– Attempts by Republicans in Ohio to get hold of lists of mismatched voters (prior to state efforts to resolve the discrepancies)...there seems to be no logical reason a partisan organization would need or be entitled to this information
– The aforementioned calls placed in Minnesota to alert Democrats that there might be a problem with their registrations
– A letter issued with the Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia, informing voters that if they were Republicans or Independents supporting Republican candidates, they should vote on Tuesday November 4, but due to overflows at the polls, if they were Democrats or people supporting Democratic candidates, they should vote on November 5.
– Efforts to challenge all 1.3 million voters newly registered by ACORN by demonizing ACORN for doing what they are SUPPOSED to be doing, by identifying faulty ballots BEFORE they were sent to the state (which is what is required by law)

I could go on, but instead, I’ll direct your attention here

But take heart. Obama is simply too far ahead in too many states to lose. Basically it boils down to the fact that there are about 15 states that Obama could win, he is ahead in more of them than he is behind, and essentially if he wins any one or two of them, he wins the election, period. McCain conversely needs to win all 15 of them….and though they may be able to cheat in one state or two, there’s just no way McCain can pull this off. Essentially something major would have to happen (i.e. a terrorist attack) to completely move the race in McCain’s direction by about 6 points (in 5 days). There simply is no historical precedent for something like this, so yes, ANYTHING can happen, but no matter how much cheating goes on, this year at least I’ll agree with Sueanne that it’s not going to make enough of a difference.

I actually expect it to be around 400 electoral votes for Obama, I think where the polls are wrong, they will be undercounting Obama’s support significantly. I’ll know I’m right when Georgia turns blue.

American people are very optimistic in the face of evidence to the contrary, most seem to think their votes will count, which must speak to their faith and not to their reason. Interesting excercise indeed.

Yup. No question.

Re voting fraud: The local voting commissions did a four year study of people crossed with death certificates. In an area with a population of about 4 million, they found about 100 people who had voted after they died. Further they investigated those and found that in 40% of the cases there were reasonable explanations like an absentee ballot sent but the voter dying before election day or a clerical error that marked down the name of a deceased father instead of that of a same name son.

All the talk about election fraud is just fear talk that is the bread and butter of the Rovians. Undoubtedly hundreds of eligible voters will be disenfranchised for each actual fraudulent vote. As a nation we need to get a grip.

@ delpetrie

Your post scare the hell our of me..the longest i ever come across

@mea: oh you just wait, that was nothing for him.

Oh yeah, I lost 2/3 of what I was gonig to write, I just summarized everything after my link as I didn’t have time to recreate it and expound upon my argument as to why you should not be worried. I figure, in 4 days it’s all over anyway.

dale: As the sky is falling, all the Chicken Littles are crying “Too much information!” They don’t get that we are in this mess because because they can’t focus on any discussion that takes longer than 30 seconds or 75 words.

Hey guys life is complex, both problems and solutions…try to keep up.

galileogirl – I agree completely. I hear it all the time (as you can imagine). But then I hear the media CONSTANTLY talking to people who say that Obama is going to tax hardworking people and give the money away to people who don’t work because he is a Socialist. Funny thing, McCain’s policies take tons of money out of the pockets of hard working people, and subsidizes the lives of the rich who don’t really do any work, but sit in meetings and invest their money all day. It’s a bitter irony, so many people you just need a catch phrase, a cliche like “Joe the Plumber”...someone completely discredited in every way shape and form within 24 hours of his appearance on the national scene, yet he’s held up as a hero to people who wouldn’t support the Republican philosophy if they actually understood it. So many people hear what they want to hear, that’s it, and if someone tries to confront them with facts, THEY are the bad guy. Your candidate feeds you a heaping pile of bullshit and the media calls them on it? Your candidate just demonizes the media. Hell, Palin thinks it’s a violation of her first Amendment rights when the media calls her on her lies. WTF?

Joe the Plumber, isn’t he a dead beat dad, back child support unpaid? He also owes back taxes—a true Hero!

@Mizuki…source, please….?

Snoopy your icon rules!!!!!

@Bri :)

Lexus Nexus—it is a public record repository that I have access to at work….Do a google, there are many sources.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24511706–5012572,00.html
Back Taxes Above, Federal Tax Lein coming in future post when I get to work.

“page not found” for the link you provided…?

I will look elsewhere…