Battle of the Buckeye Blogs

Also remember that Philadelphia's ambitious plan to equip the entire city with wireless Internet access is being done in part to serve such wards, where many people live below the poverty line and cannot afford private in-home access at current prices.

All the King's Web Sites

Imagine if Willie Stark had hired Jack Burden as his full-time blogging coordinator. Better yet, let's not. There are plenty of elected officials running around these days who owe some debt of gratitude to cyberspace, and according to Michael Cornfield of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, President Bush is one.

Speaking at an online media and marketing conference run by MediaPost, Cornfield said the 2004 Bush campaign "married software to Tupperware." More from MediaPost: "Bush's camp, said Cornfeld [sic], used the Internet to find volunteers and then gave them information to spread -- via any medium at hand -- to friends and neighbors."

The site's editors ran a hyperbolic headline -- "Pew Consultant: Bush Owes Victory to Internet." If that's all it took to win the top office in the United States, no one would need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to sway the outcome. But never mind, we see what they're getting at.

One politician who thanked the Internet for all it's done for him is Al Gore. The former vice president and Democratic also-ran in the 2000 presidential race accepted a Webby Tuesday night in New York.

David Carr of the New York Times reported: "One of the more charming idiosyncrasies of the Webby Awards, the annual awards for achievement in Web creation, requires that recipients use five words, and five words only, to make their acceptance speeches. So after a night full of award innuendos and one-line haiku at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, the 550 people in attendance were wondering how Al Gore, the loquacious former vice president, would respond to his lifetime achievement award. He did not disappoint.

"'Please don't recount this vote,' he said. The place went nuts."

Gore took a lot of flak in 2000 for a comment he made that implied that he invented the Internet, so it was only natural that so-called father of the Internet Vinton Cerf introduced him at the awards banquet with the five-word speech, "We all invented the Internet."

The Webbys, which recognize the best of the Internet from incorporated to incoherent, have been around since 1997. Here are this year's winners and nominees.

Not Another Corrupt Political Machine!

I reported a couple of weeks ago that Miami-Dade elections officials were considering whether to dump the county's $24.5 million iVotronic paperless voting system. Lester Sola, the county's elections supervisor, wrote in a May 27 report that the operational costs, not to mention the great, big controversy surrounding their accuracy and the possibility of fixing an election, were enough to convince him that older Optical Scan machines were the way to go.

Now the trend is spreading. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that Volusia County Council members scotched a contract intended to bring touchscreen voting machines into their county.

"Intended to meet a state deadline for disabled-accessible voting, the touch screens vexed voters who want something the machines don't produce -- a paper ballot. But in trying to keep a lock on the ballot box, the council may have opened itself to a conflict with the state and disabled advocacy groups," the paper wrote. "'I have to live with my conscience, and I feel I did the right thing,' said County Chairman Frank Bruno, one of four council members to vote against the $782,185 contract with Diebold Election Systems."

The News-Journal editorial board called the move a brave one that actually benefits all voters, disabled or not: "Election officials in Florida -- especially those who endured the 2000 presidential election -- should be aware of the value of fair, verifiable, secure balloting. Touch-screen machines ... may be a viable alternative at some point, but without a voter-verified paper receipt of individual ballots, they don't meet that basic democratic test."

The Orlando Sentinel detailed Diebold senior attorney Michael Lindross's Edmund Muskie moment, proving that the Ohio company's commitment to paperless voting is more than a job, it's a passion: "Diebold executives in attendance said they have never seen a county back out of a contract for voting machines at the last minute as Volusia did. ... At one point, [Lindross] choked back tears as he defended his company's long track record in the security business. He noted that [county officials] worked out a better agreement than the one Diebold has with the Smithsonian Institution to protect the Hope Diamond."

Note to all you voting conspiracy theorists out there: Diebold executives have feelings too.

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