Tonight while listening to my friends discuss how to select a board for a new organization I joked, "Well you can just call it a democratically elected board but then hold the election with digital voting machines...". The ellipsis standing of course for the inference that with digital voting machines just about anything is possible. Of course that's pretty typical of my cynical and biting humour, but as more and more people are becoming aware such thoughts are dangerously close to the truth. The article Sum of a Glitch at In These Times highlights just a few of the more notable "glitches" that are totally subverting any semblance of democracy in the United States.
The most important lesson to learn from "Sum of a Glitch" is that people are on the whole, gullible and blissfully ignorant about how any of the technological systems around them work, or should work. It used to be that the majority of people just need to know how to plough a field, when to plant the crops and when to harvest. The kind of knowledge that could be passed on easily from generation to generation and for the longest time, indeed thousands of years, got people by.
The most technologically advanced people you might encounter in life might be doctors, which if they were too effective at healing might be mistaken for witches, or messiahs. Fortunately for all concerned they generally weren't and the most effective remedies were so called folk remidies known to virtually all and for the most part freely available to all.
Sure there were craftsmen and artisans who specialized in skills not related to food production, but even though the layman did not have their specific knowledge of how to do stuff it was easy to comprehend how one might shoe a horse, make furniture, throw a pot, or paint a portrait. There just wasn't really any magic involved in those things. Sure a few things appeared to have magic behind them, like the use of explosives, but usually the "magic" was just an artifact of some well kept secrets of the trade such as the recipe for gunpowder and how to pick a lock.
Then along came the industrial revolution and all that went to hell in a hand basket. Machines were invented that worked in ways and with technology that the ordinary person just plain didn't understand. The external and internal combustion engines, electricity, magnetism, the electric motor, radio, semiconductors, nuclear power, genetic engineering, biophysics, chemical engineering, even basic structural engineering and physics. The list goes on and on and for the most part its just an accepted fact of modern life that most people will blithely interact and even worse, completely depend on, many systems every day that they have no clue how they work or what to do if they stop working.
So really its only natural to expect humans of this era to calmly and unquestionably accept that the most fundamental process of democracy, voting, should suddenly become this thing that no one understands and no one questions. In less than 100 years its easy to imagine future generations who would ask "How could you vote without a machine?" just as these days someone can say "How could you do math without a calculator?" or "How can you do research without the Internet?" or "How can I get to work without a car!".
Should this be a frightening future to contemplate? Well as the early evidence is showing, the answer is most definitely yes!. It is often said that to err is human, but to really foul up requires a computer and foul up they have been. And behind each incident is a human saying something inane to the effect of "the computer did it!" or "its just a glitch!" etc. etc. and just because no one dies because of a voting machine error for the most part they get away with it. Unfortunately what is dying is not people at the voting both (well, that hasn't happened yet) but the very democratic process that a significant part of American is trying to cling onto.
When every vote is fully machine based and incontestable because there was no paper trail the entire democratic process will titer on a precipice, at the whim of any passing gust of corruption, or subsidence of its footings caused by network and software errors or infiltration from outside. And because Americans are for the most part blissfully ignorant of even the very basics of maths, science, statistics, logic and more importantly history, well then any old hand waving argument about how "the computer is always right" or "it was computer error" will win them over as easily as that old "follow the lady" trick played by street corner grifters. Its always has and always will.
Indeed institutionalized ignorance has progressed so far that we have even started to reach the point where the old "fear of those who know" line can easily be played to discredit those who really do know. After all people for the most part would prefer to believe those that just tell them everything is going to be okay, whether from a position of ignorance or knowledge. The appearance of an outsider with bad tidings or new ideas contrary to the official wisdom (as in the case of the consequences of global warming) is seldom a welcome visitor. Using fear, uncertainty and doubt is a very easy weapon to persuade the uninformed locals that he should be sent packing ASAP just like the lone cowboy from out of town in an old spaghetti western.
Perhaps this was always the case, but from my subjective point of view it does seem that suspension of disbelief in this country really has reached an all time high. Study after study on digital voting systems that are fundamentally flawed, insecure and basically fail, fail and fail again just doesn't manage to get people protesting on the streets. All we can do is raise our arms and say "Yeah!" and praise be to Diebold that there will never be any more hanging chads and coincidentally no more pesky paper trail to have to have to ponder about recounting. The eventual elimination of the later (if many have their way) is clearly a very convenient outcome of the 2000 election for anyone interested in the kind of election fraud that we've always pointed and laughed at other countries for putting up with.
The 40,000 legitimate voters purged from the electoral roll in Florida is just over 0.01% of the population of the USA. Coincidentally that's just about the error rate claimed by voting machine manufacturers when they say their equipment is "99.99% accurate". Clearly when large numbers of votes are involved a lot can slip into the cracks of the democracy without anyone noticing or caring even though as we've seen, just a few hundred can make literally a world of the difference.
So if you think the screw ups, and yes folks even election fraud we've seen so far perpetrated in the name of "fairer and more accurate elections" is big deal, well then you ain't seen nothing yet - you mark my words! But you had better print them out quick before I delete them without a trace because in a digital world anything is possible and the truth is as quickly erased as the history is altered to prove it never happened.
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