Rebooting voting in the US - a final word

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/GettyAhead of the elections, Greg Palast wrote a post: How they stole the midterm election.

Greg didn't see the election being stolen by the electronic voting machines made by Diebold and Sequoia (now owned by Florida-based Smartmatic, which was founded by two Venezuelan engineers - another rabbit hole to go down). Greg saw the election being stolen, by Republicans, with insidious voter regulations and voter intimidation.

Now, depending on how you read all the myriad reports of irregularities, either enough people voted for Democrats to overcome the 5% of votes that were suppressed, or there might be other explanations. I've been reading everything I can for three days and checking sources in the US, and my tentative conclusion is: Yes, problems continue, but it was better than recent elections.

Before I go into this, let me also state that I don't entirely agree with Greg's reading about "Them", them being the Republicans. Look, both Republicans and Democrats trade allegations of dirty election day tricks, as Jill Zuckerman pointed out in the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp blog.

While most ordinary people might think that there is little to do but wait for the results of today's elections, that's not the case for zealous party officials.

A public relations battle has broken out with both Republicans and Democrats on the look out for dirty tricks that they can quickly publicize to embarrass the other side.

And this isn't a new phenomenon, and the cheats aren't always from the Republican party. Hey, I'm from near Chicago, and the famous joke was "vote early and vote often". This has gone on for decades, back to the 1960s when LBJ allegedly disappeared some votes in Texas, and Mayor Daley of Chicago dug up some votes for Kennedy. The US has been here before, but with Republicans crying foul over allegations of Democratic fraud.