election time in USA

This was an unusual statistic that struck me when i was surfing through the election news. The neighbourhood is awash with color printed campaign boards and it does give a rather pretty and festive look to the area. I wondered how the american system compared to ours, with its ballot box stuffing, booth capturing, multliple voting, shots fired into the sky and countless other uniquely indian expressions of universal franchise. The below statistic should be troubling for all americans, because this is basically reflecting a sense of alienation and distrust of the system.

Notably, African American voters express much more skepticism their votes will be accurately counted than they did in the fall of 2004. Just 30% say they are very confident their votes will be accurately counted, down from 47% two years ago. The percentage of black voters who express little or no confidence in vote-counting procedures has approximately doubled ­ from 15% to 29%. More than three times as many blacks as whites now say they have little or no confidence their vote will be accurately tallied (29% vs. 8%).

An unrelated note- Andy Tanenbaum, who may be familiar to geeks and computer buffs as the guy who wrote all those textbooks, runs a site called electoral-vote.com which demystifies all the various trends and polls and makes simple graphical presentations on how the elections are going.