Last month, as more voting machine glitches turned up in a special election in Florida, and earlier mistakes that were discovered elsewhere last year remained uninvestigated, former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker announced the formation of a bipartisan, non-governmental commission to scan the whole federal election system. They […]

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Trumping the Right Wing—Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, was already in trouble when he toiled to engineer the controversial congressional intervention into the Terri Schiavo drama. It was an example of “justice DeLayed is justice denied.” Among other discoveries following DeLay’s drive to push Congress to do […]

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The next time you see one of those yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons on a passing car think about what happens after the soldiers come home from war. They become veterans, and supporting veterans usually costs more money than a supposedly grateful nation cares to spend. This seems to happen after every war, but now […]

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Out of Town—But not soon enough? Just when we were exclaiming “at last!” as the 109th Congress was fleeing the Capitol for a two-week Easter recess, some hard-line Republican conservatives, led by Representative Tom Delay of Texas, maneuvered themselves into the life-or-death case of Terri Schiavo. She is the 41-year-old Florida woman now in her […]

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After his retirement from the New York Times in 2003, Adam Clymer, our former colleague there in the Washington bureau, where he was an election campaign correspondent and editor, became a political-statistics specialist. He is one of the most probing and even-handed election analysts and is now in charge of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Election Survey. […]

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