I've listened to a lot of pontificating last night and today about the "surprise" results from the New Hampshire primary last night, both on radio and TV. I kept wondering what kind of voting machines was used in New Hampshire. When I got to my computer this evening, I did some searches.

Apparently I'm not the only with these thoughts. Even the ABC News director of polling, Gary Langer, calls in his blog for an investigation into the discrepancies between the polls and the results. http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenumbers/2008/01/new-hampshires.html His blog has dozens of comments about this. The Brad Blog http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5530 gives a lot of thoughts about this.

Apparently significant parts of New Hampshire use bad Diebold voting machines run by a company with a questionable reputation. Credible university studies have found that these machines can be manipulated. Do I believe that some of the parties involved here might be so power desperate that they would resort to such things? Unfortunately, I do believe that it is possible.

So, my question is, why hasn't the mainstream media, i.e. CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, NPR, etc even mentioned that this questioning of the results is going on? And, how ironic that on this very day, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging an Indiana law which requires a photo ID for everyone who wants to vote? Several of the justices even seemed to think, by their questioning, that if some people that are eligible to vote don't get to vote, too bad - that's just how it is.

And our governmental officials travel around the world and even go to war to promote "democracy." If we are going to tout democracy, shouldn't we be sure that in our own nation, everyone who is eligible to vote and wants to vote, can vote easily, and that their vote will be counted fairly? At this point in our history, we are far from that, and yet the mainstream media, which pats itself on the back constantly for being free and independent, seems afraid to even bring up the subject.

We'll see what happens as this race progresses. Certainly will be interesting.