CLIFFORD D. MAY: Shouldn&#39;t Palestinians have a real election?
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(SH) - In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai defeated a raft of candidates to win his historic election. In Iraq, more than 200 political parties have registered for next month&#39;s elections.
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Description: Palestinians prepare to vote for new leadership in a Jan. 9 election that no longer looks like a tight race. There are seven candidates for the presidency, but interim leader Mahmoud Abbas&#39; victory now seems assured.
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Text of report by Estonian newspaper Postimees website on 5 September  [Commentary by Rein Veidemann: "Media Circus"]  Elections make for fatty raw material to the free media. The supply of news and opinions is far greater than the demand.
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For ordinary Palestinians Tony Blair&#39;s visit was generally seen as little more than a publicity stunt that had less to do with them than the British electorate.
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nearly three decades, a dress rehearsal for a presidential ballot next month to choose Yasser Arafat&#39;s successor. Fatah movement and Islamists sworn to destroying Israel.
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ANALYSIS:The death of Yasser Arafat will pose a challenge, but could result in a more legitimate government. BY STEVEN ERLANGER. RAMALLAH, West Bank - Yasser Arafat was both the symbol of the Palestinians&#39; hope
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Tens of thousands of Israelis of Iraqi descent have the right to vote in the Jan. 30 elections &#151; including a former defense minister and a comedian known for his sidesplitting imitations of Saddam Hussein &#151; but it's hard to find anyone interested in actually casting ballots.
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TONY EASTLEY: It&#39;s less than a month now until the United States election and terrorism and the war in Iraq continue to dominate that campaign, to the virtual exclusion of other issues.
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Comment is free: Karma Nabulsi: The drivers of violence in Gaza are clearly external. When all Palestinians can vote for sovereign rule, peace will be within reach.
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Comment is free: Karen Koning AbuZayd: Palestinian suffering has reached new depths. Peace cannot be built by reducing 1.5m people to a state of abject destitution
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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Palestinians hold municipal elections in parts of the West Bank on Thursday, seen as a dress rehearsal for a presidential vote to choose Yasser Arafat&#39;s successor next month.
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Analysts say securing the popular vote is key for the credibility of new Palestinian leadership.
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Comment is free: George Monbiot: The push for participatory democracy has the disturbing whiff of an Astroturf campaign - a fake grassroots movement.
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If Marwan Barghouti really wants to be chairman of the Palestinian Authority, he should withhold his candidature at this time and allow Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to take responsibility for the transition into the post-Arafat era.
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Palestinians must act quickly to hold elections for a leader to replace Yasser Arafat if they are to peacefully transform their political system after more than
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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' decision to call early presidential and parliament elections is fraught with legal and political difficulties. Independent experts have said he is on shaky legal ground, and the ruling Hamas Party says it will challenge him every step of the way.