Why Would Anybody Cheat In An Election? (NOT A Primary Post !!!)

[WillyT]

Conspiracy Theorist
Why would anybody cheat in an election?

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

January 24, 2008

<snip>

“We should at least get votes back on paper and get people counting them by hand.”

As innocuous as these words may sound, they make me feel like I’m on I-35 in Minneapolis, headed toward the Mississippi bridge. Ankle-deep in a presidential election year, I find myself without faith in the infrastructure of American civilization.

This is not what I’d like to be writing about. Our nation’s soul is bleeding, its future up for grabs. The candidates jockey for a mandate — our mandate — and they’ll define it as narrowly as possible unless we define it for them. How thoroughly and courageously do we repudiate the Cheney-Bush legacy? How resolutely do we move toward peace and global oneness? That’s what 2008 is all about, right?

Why, then, must I divert my attention from matters such as this and ponder . . . memory cards and molded plastic deflectors? Ah, democracy! We can’t simply leave it to the voting machine vendors any more than we can leave it to the politicians. The O-rings and gusset plates of democracy are poised to fail in every election; every vote does not count. The media and most government officials are still in denial about this, still dazzled by glitzy, electronic voting technology or maybe just trapped in their billion-dollar commitment to it. Besides, when has technology ever gone backwards?

But the call for paper ballots and hand counting — however jarring and quaint it may sound in the 21st century — comes most urgently not from Luddites or flat-Earthers but the technophiles and self-proclaimed geeks who understand computers most intimately, and know their vulnerabilities.

Bruce O’Dell, quoted above, is a security specialist who works with large-scale computer systems in the banking, insurance, bond-trading and related industries, and as a citizen has been one of those people tirelessly sounding the alarm about the dangers of electronic voting, a mission that has included, among much else, addressing legislative subcommittees in Texas and New Hampshire on voting machines.

For him, electronic voting is “this fabulous ‘solution’ in search of a problem. I just don’t know what the problem is. Speed of tabulation appears to be the only benefit” — affecting, most noticeably, the ability of television networks to deliver winners and losers to the American public within an eyeblink of the polls’ closing. This is terrific, I guess, to the extent that democracy is a spectator sport.

To the extent that it’s something else — e.g., a yoking of power to the common good, a serious and private deliberation on national direction, a precise ascertainment of the consent of the governed — electronic voting contributes nothing but uncertainty. And, of course, the possibility of widespread fraud.

For ATMs and all other electronic equipment, O’Dell points out, the foundation of our trust in them is proof of identification: PIN numbers and other means of user verification. “Precisely none of that occurs with voting.” It can’t. We vote in secret. A vote, once cast, can never be linked to the one who cast it.

Because of this, the voter should be the one who puts his or her ballot in the ballot box — a ritualistic, indeed, sacred act of citizenship — with the assurance that the box’s chain of custody will never be compromised: that it will never be out of official sight, that its contents will be emptied and counted with full public scrutiny.

<snip>

More: http://commonwonders.com/archives/col431.htm

Can't be said enough.

:shrug: