Google me: US election fertile ground for cyber commentators

By ALEXIS GRANT

As the heat grows in the US presidential election, incumbent George W. Bush and contender John Kerry accuse each other of using dirty tricks to win the White House.

But who's dirtier, Republicans or Democrats?

Google should be a fair judge. Type in "dirty tricks US elections".

At The Rock All Times, James Frotbox writes that "the otherwise absurdly freakish circus that is the American election trail has been thrown into a tumult of back-biting and uproar". According to Frotbox, Democrats are to blame.

But plenty of online wisdom nails the Republicans as the culprits.

"Just how close is dirty trickster Nathan Sproul to the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign?" asks Max Blumenthal at AlterNet.

Then there's the underdog, independent Ralph Nader, who has accused the Democrats and Republicans of working together to stop his campaign.

Senator Kerry is "directly responsible for the anti-democratic dirty tricks attempting to keep Nader-Camejo off the ballot", says Nader at All American Patriots.

Or is the American intelligence agency the true trickster? At Skolnick's Report, self-proclaimed court reformer Sherman Skolnick explains his theory that the 2000 election was an intelligence agency covert scheme.

"The American CIA and their privatised adjuncts, such as reportedly [security firm] Wackenhut, have long engaged in overthrowing foreign governments, assassinating popular US leaders and officials, causing fake foreign and domestic 'emergencies' and coups. Why is it hard then to believe they would not also orchestrate, on a vast scale, the overthrowing of the American central Government?"

As the race for the White House gets tighter, the ultimate dirty trick would be keeping voters from the polls.

"Millions of US citizens, including a disproportionate number of black voters, will be blocked from voting in the ... election because of legal barriers, faulty procedures or dirty tricks," Reuters wrote last month.

In Florida, where the last presidential election became a muddled mess, faulty machines and disenfranchised voters struck again, the Guardian reported on Tuesday. The story details scams urging people to vote over the telephone and allegedly registering them for absentee ballots.