Word: lever
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Since the country's colonial days, concerns of voter fraud have inspired ever-more complicated ways to cast one's ballot. Depending on where you live, you may vote tomorrow with a lever, a punch card, a marker or a touchscreen. As election scholar Andrew Gumbel notes, the U.S. has been both a "living experiment in the expansion of democratic rights" and a "world-class laboratory for vote suppression and election-stealing techniques...
...visit the same polling place more than once, and "plug-uglies" (thugs from Baltimore) to intimidate voters all over the city. The fake voters exploited the names of children, the deceased, even fictional characters. In 1869, 21-year-old Thomas Edison patented the design of a "switch-and-lever" voting machine, but he couldn't find any buyers. The status quo suited politicians just fine...
...Some argue that I should vote to express myself. But is it impossible to find a better way to express oneself than pulling a lever in a closed booth and marking down the name of a proxy with which one barely agrees...
...than are the public as a whole. He did find, however, that undecided voters are more likely to be predicted as McCain voters than are the general population; 50% of undecideds will likely go for McCain, compared with the 36% of decided voters who say they will pull the lever for the Republican...
...concerned about the Bradley effect--the theory that secretly racist white people tell pollsters they'll vote for a black candidate like Barack Obama but will actually pull the lever for a white one like John McCain. The truth is that secretly racist white people happily vote for black candidates, listen to black musicians and laugh at black comedians to make themselves feel better about not having black friends. In fact, I once even tried to get all the way through Barbershop...