Hundreds of irate Palm Beach County voters, fearing they or their friends voted for Buchanan instead of Gore, besieged the county Election Department on Tuesday and Wednesday with complaints about the ballot.
Buchanan received 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County, far more than neighboring areas such as Broward County, where he got 786, and Miami-Dade County, where he got 561. In precinct 162G, the Lakes of Delray area where Gore received one of his highest vote totals in all of Palm Beach County, a county high of 47 voters picked Buchanan, too.

I'm getting ready to go vote ... then my girlfriend and I are going to do something absolutely numbing, like drink a bottle of gin and go see "Charlie's Angels" or the like. That way when I find out who won tomorrow, I will already have my blinding headache and wrenching nausea firmly in place.

Why do they just make fun of each other?

It will be a rally either way. You basically have a choice between a candidate who is pro-business and one who is more pro-business.

Perhaps there's a reason why Nader rallies seem so white, middle class, and disproportionately male; in short, so supported by those who wouldn't be hurt if Bush were in the White House.

Jason Ziedenberg and Vincent Schiraldi
The Justice Policy Institute
(202) 737-7270
kate rhee
program director
prison moratorium project
krhee@mindspring.com
T.  646/486.6715
F.  212/727.8616
www.nomoreprisons.org

... It will be justifiable on sociological and psychological grounds... hiring foreign players will appeal to our slave mentality fostered by centuries of colonial rule. Sociologists will tell you that anything with foreign connections has an elitist overtone for us.

The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, My children are dying, what can you do? They're not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something.

What emerged from this septic tank was this: when the chips are down, New York City Democrats often seem to see enemies only on the left, and are friendly to, or at least collude with, deviations to the right. At the meeting, it was noted that New York Democrats have, from time to time, endorsed Giuliani or others of that ilk for motives of presumed political expediency or shared ideology, and the Party has, in those circumstances, winked and looked the other way. But they seek to purge Democrats who, for reasons of conscience and intelligence, support Nader.

Cornel West: I’m for brother Ralph Nader. Not because he’s a perfect candidate — no candidate is perfect. But for me on personal grounds, I reached a point where working people and poor people are so disregarded and disrespected by a corporate-dominated Democratic Party that you have to begin a new cycle somewhere with somebody. And this broadens the discourse and broadens the engagement. And maybe we can see a little leftward leaning in the Dem ocratic Party. We shall see.

Salim Muwakkil: The choice between Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and Democrat Al Gore is an agonizing choice, for all the obvious reasons. The choice is a bit clearer for African-Americans, however, who likely would bear the brunt of a Republican administration should George W. Bush squeak past Gore. What’s more, there’s a good chance that Congress will remain in the GOP’s hands; that dire prospect would set the stage for a three-branch assault on the very idea of an activist, progressive government. It was that idea that justified programs designed to redress the varied legacies of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid. I remember the dirty dozen years of the Reagan-Bush regime and its dire consequences. But I also remember how that era started and how many progressives urged a vote for independent candidate John Anderson in the 1980 election that launched Reagan; Jimmy Carter was too tepid a liberal for our tastes. The black community is still paying a steep price for the perverse policies put in place during that benighted era. Nader clearly is the best man for the job, but I’m voting for the lesser of the two-party evils. The worst of those evils is just too likely to cause too much damage.

Ishmael Reed: The white left can afford to experiment with Nader, because they agree with Bush that the problems African-Americans face are traceable to their personal behavior. As an African-American, I have to go with Gore, given the alternative. The Bush family gave us Willie Horton, drugs in the inner city, the outrage of Tulia, Texas, where 17 percent of the adult African-American population was rounded up and humiliated before photographers on trumped-up drug charges that were based upon the testimony of a corrupt undercover agent. And recently George W. Bush and his wife defended the Confederate flag. She even said that the Confederate flag was part of the Southern heritage. I wonder what heritage she’s talking about? Whipping people? George Bush’s enthusing about the reading scores of African-American fourth-graders has got to be the most cynical act in recent political history. The Bush family is always using black people for one purpose or the other. Bush’s father is famous for the Willie Horton campaign, in which they used a negative image of black people to gain 30 points among white male voters in the South during the time that Horton ad was used. In this case, they’re using black people to show their compassionate conservatism.

Due to an anticipated voter turnout much larger than originally expected, the polling facilities may not be able to handle the load all at once. Therefore, Democrats are requested to vote on Tuesday, November 7, and Republicans on Wednesday, November 8. Please pass this message along and help us to make sure that nobody gets left out.

If you happen to find yourself in conversation with a stranger, what's wrong with talking about France's surprising victory in the World Cup, say, instead of mining the Francophile roots of ambulatory social commentary?

For the first time, all Oregon ballots will be cast by mail (or dropped off at 240 sites). So will more than half the votes in Washington state and one-third in California.
Washington could be a long nail-biter - ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 7 but can arrive as late as Nov. 22 and still get counted. In 1996, 51.2 percent of Washington voters cast mail ballots. And it seemed to take forever this winter to count Washington's primary vote.
...
Oregon starts counting ballots on Election Day morning but California - which expects 4.5 million mail ballots - won't even start until polls close at 8 p.m.