IT'S TOUCH AND GO IF OUR REMAINING RIGHTS CAN BE REMOVED BEFORE THE ELECTION: Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Queen's Speech is nobody at all seems to believe the ridiculous "planes flying into Canary Wharf" story leaked to ITN and the Mail to soften us up for more terror-inspired withdrawal of our rights. It comes to something when Trevor McDonald can pop up during Corrie's Maya-blows-up-Dev's-shops hystericofest, and manage to sound even more implausible than the drama.

Anyway, the details of the plans aren't all about throwing us in prison for having thought crimes:

+ Extending child benefit to people with 16-19 year olds in further education is a pretty good idea
+ It'll be in the details, but it's about time charity law had an overhaul. If it means Eton has to admit its a business, it could be a good thing
+ The local environment things sound good in principle - about time something was done about light pollution
+ Crossrail - it'll be fucked up by the time it happens, but building crossrail could at least give the chance of a sensible transport policy at some point in the future
+ Inquiries bill - we can't see a government dominated by lawyers actually allowing this to make public inquiries faster and cheaper, but you never know your luck
+ Draft commons bill - that's as in green patches of land. This could be positive; it seems to be aimed at creating something like a informal protected area for places that are part of "the rural cultural identity of England and Wales"
+ Mental health laws overhaul - again, something that's been needed for quite a while.

 
WE WONDER IF THE WHITE HOUSE IS ADDING THE WORD SATIRE IN BRACKETS TO ITS UKRANIAN STATEMENTS: It's quite inspiring to see Ukranians refusing to accept an apparently shoddily counted election, and heartwarming to see the American government adding its support to them:

Washington has accused the Ukrainian government of skewing the poll in favour of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich - President Leonid Kuchma's preferred successor - by clamping down on the state media and throwing the resources of the state behind its man.

Totally unlike the US elections, of course, where you'd not have caught George W Bush using Air Force One or the other paraphanelia of the Presidency to push his campaign for re-election, would you? Oh. Well, at least he didn't clamp down on the media - the White House were more than happy to leave the media totally unfettered to do whatever they chose. There was no indication at all that Bush forced Fox to be rabidly pro-Bush.

The main stinking smelly rat from the elections in Ukraine is because the exit polls were so startingly different from the actual poll result - the exits pointed to an 11% lead in favour of Yuschenko compared to the "official" result of 3% for Yanukovich. Of course, the Bush adminsitration finds that sort of discrepancy a little too large to be true - when you're talking about Ukraine, of course. A dip from, say, a 20% poll Kerry lead to an actual 1% Kerry lead, as happened in Pennsylvania, or the evaporation of Kerry leads in exit polls time and time again not replicated when people were voting electronically rather than in a traditional manner - that, of course, is a sign that the exit polls themselves were wrong, or flawed, or misinterpreted. It's really quite simple.

 
HE SEES HIMSELF AS MR. TESCO: In perhaps one of the most bizarre pieces of sideways thinking we've yet seen from the government, David Blunkett has suggested that having a national ID card is no different from having a supermarket loyalty card. Not until they won't let you into Sainsburys unless you have a Nectar card, it isn't.

 
IT DOESN'T QUITE ADD UP: It is possible the extraordinary discrepencies between exit polls and actual votes, and the mysterious patterns of those figures seemingly tied to those places where some form of electronic voting was taking place is little more than a bizarre coincidence. Certainly, it would seem to be worth investigating - if only to give election 2004 a clean bill of health. What is surprising, though, is that the conservatives believe that, yes, all this strangeness does prove there's been a conspiracy. But against them - they think it proves that the exit polls had been rigged to try and stop Bush, rather than the more obvious conclusion that the polls - conducted on machines running bloody Windows - have got a dubious element to them. But would someone really have hacked in and changed the election votes, like in that episode of Grange Hill where the brainy kid altered his scores?

Lets see:

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

And you know what's really odd? There was a website which had a clip of this - votergate.tv. Someone hacked in and deleted the files.

Maybe Bush did win without the help of some hackers. But then surely he'd be happy to demonstrate this by inviting an indpendent inquiry?

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

 
THE COST OF VICTORY: A report from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that while you can't actually guarantee that you can simply buy your victory in the US, you can have a pretty high level of certainty that the polls will work like an auction, not an election:

In 96 percent of House races and 91 percent of Senate races that had been decided by mid-day today, the candidate who spent the most money won, according to a post-election analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The findings are based on figures reported Oct. 13 to the Federal Election Commission.

The biggest spender was victorious in 413 of 432 decided House races and 31 of 34 decided Senate races. On Election Day 2002, top spenders won 95 percent of House races and 76 percent of Senate races.

 
HOW MANY HURRICANES DOES AN ANGRY GOD HAVE TO SEND BEFORE FLORIDIANS GET THE MESSAGE?: My brother says this reminds him of when Major won the '91 election over Kinnock - and there are a surprising number of parallels, thinking about it: a weak candidate who's been the butt of jokes for his lame-duck nature, defending a postion he hadn't won through any proper electoral process; a challenger who was intellectually superior but who had trouble connecting with people; going right down to the last minute of polling time; coverage of the count suggesting it would be probably a victory for the challenger at the start - but with predictions moving further and further right as the election results came in.

And, of course, the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as you realise that people have gone and voted that way is identical...

Of course: the Major administration was a fiasco, and the mixture of sleaze and stupidity has resulted in the largely unelectable Tory party we have now... so, let's hope the parallels keep coming.

(We're aware of the differences, not least that the British system left Major trying to work with a parliament that offered him dwindling support - not a problem for Bush who seems to have all sides tied up nicely in his favour now.)