It seems the third party candidates want recounts more than the Democrats. At least, they can request them without looking crazier than they already do, anyway.

Ralph Nader has requested recounts in New Hampshire and Ohio, and wants to do so in Florida. Cobb and Badnarik are working to make sure a recount happens in Ohio.

This is all good news. I don’t expect this will change the outcome of the election at all, but I have no doubt it will reveal massive errors or fraud with the new electronic voting machines. We need auditable machines with paper trails, or we just can’t trust the voting results in the future.

Republicans seem to want to move the other way. There were huge problems with Florida with hanging chads and dimpled chads in recounting the ballots in 2000, so what did they do? They eliminated that problem by using machines that you just can’t do that sort of recount with. Brilliant. Now, they want to do away with http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04027.html. (Sorry, that link is to a highly biased website; I can’t get at the article it links to, and can’t find this anywhere else. Thanks, mainstream media!)

After early exit polls in Tuesday’s election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.

In remarks Thursday at the National Press Club, Mr. Gillespie said he is among those who were stunned by exit poll reports, which leaked widely on the Internet. “I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession — look at the precincts and the turnout, see who’s turning out to vote,” Mr. Gillespie said. “Don’t build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be.”

Exit polls aren’t perfect, but they’re one of the few remaining tools we have to ensure a fair voting process. If they’re broken, we need to fix them, not get rid of them. Either way, if we keep eliminating the possibility of a recount, the exit polls become more important than ever.

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