Al Franken's Political Adventure

Yeah, Al Franken - that guy from SNL in its glory days. He's down by hundreds of votes according to officially released numbers yet his own campaign claims he is actually up in the recount. Whether Franken wins or not is not really my primary interest at this point. The supposed super-majority in congress was a bit of a fiction that was never really going to pan out anyway. Of interest now is what the Franken recount says about the voting process in the U.S.

In short: the vote is fucked!

Franken is finding out for all of us how political and fragile our representative democracy truly happens to be. Ballots are miscounted by machines and humans alike. Ballots go missing. The recount process itself is wildly political and tedious. With all of the technology in the world at our disposal this is apparently the best we can do. The voting process is a complete and abysmal failure. The flaws in the process are so cringe-worthy that I don't think I can think of the U.S. as a democracy of any kind ever again except with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

America, you fail it.