Letters to the Editor
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re: Day late and a dollar short Farhad, you should have been writing about this years ago.
casey, Farhad was one of the FIRST journalists covering the problems with the elctions - which are still FAR from PROVEN as stolen, thus the appropriate label conspiracy theorists. You guys haven't even been able to convince the most liberal of publications, including Nation writer and far lefty David Corn - who, along with Farhad and others, have been better at debunking YOU than you have been at making your case. On top of that, Farhad, with whom I've disagreed with many times over his writing, has been COMPLETELY skeptical of the American political system, and has ALWAYS been open to PROOF of a stolen election. Long lines in Ohio, and a republican heading Diebold, as well as disagreeing exit polls are, at best, circumstantal - and even recent PROOF that voting machines COULD be hacked, is hardly proof that they WERE hacked - as much as you want to believe it. Add to that the real confusion surrounding the conspiracy, such as problems in DEMOCRATIC strongholds (in 2000 and 2004), as well credible charges of both REPUBLICAN and DEMOCRATIC malfeasence, and you sound like a black helicopter Libertarian about to tell us how the UN wants to take over America!
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Where's the hate?
Although it has been mentioned, Manjoo has less than zero credibilty on this subject. Seeing as he spent so much time and energy trying to convince us that everything was on the up and up in the last "election," his death bed conversion the week before the next "election" seems awful disengenuous. Salon sacrafices the tiny little bit of integrity it has left by continuing to allow him to publish on this issue. You seem to do so much better on stories about how hard it is to be an upper class mom, perhaps after the next "election" is stolen, you can go back to that. Because by the end of the next month the American people will have "moved on" anyway, all this election rigging nonsense long forgotten and a whole new fall tv season to savor.
Be sure to pick up your "Enabler, First Class" award from the White House Mr. Manjoo, you've earned it.
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"man"
Middle school is where boys (and girls) are beginning to master spelling, beginning to master nuance (instead of ALL CAPS) to make a point, and beginning to master...bate. You are obviously adept at jerking off. Best wishes as you attempt to master the other two skills.
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So Many Problems, So Little Time...
There was a time when white property owning males in this country voted they would write their names in a book and their vote next to it. A completely verifiable paper trail.
Fear of intimidation lead to our current anonymous ballots, but one wonders if perhaps we were better off with public voting.
Certainly, that would solve the problem right there. Type in your SS# enter your votes, and be able to check on a master website if your vote is the one you wanted. Of course to make that work properly, you would have to make it public how everyone voted, and of course, people would claim after the fact that others were changing their votes for what ever reason, and perhaps you would wind up right back where we started.
I worry about the hacking issue, but not nearly as much as I worry about the local corruption issue. I am person who regularly crosses party lines, and lives in Newark NJ, and I have little doubt that when I cross from red to blue my votes are counted, and when I cross from blue to red, or occasionally green, my votes are perhaps not counted as much.
This of course far predates the current fear about touch screen voting controversies. The old pin and gear machines used in this country never produced a paper trail and had a very high failure rate. The best one could ever do is to test a machine afterward to see if it was counting votes properly, but the votes themselves were lost forever. I wonder what it means that vote manipulation and poll worker incompetence only became a major issue when it worked against democrats. Perhaps we were just finally upset enough by the obvious manipulations to raise our voices regardless of the outcome. Perhaps media on the left is more concerned now that it is working against them, than right wing media was in the past about this same issue.
The statement that "paperless touch-screen machines store their votes on hard drives and memory cards, rendering recounts impossible. If the computer hasn't recorded people's votes correctly in the first place, or if someone has weaseled into the database and shifted around the totals, the true count will be lost to all forever." is only partially true. As anyone who has studied computer forensics can tell you, digital fingerprints are as hard to get rid of as actual fingerprints. If the vote is hacked egregiously it will be clear, and culprits will be found. Subtle hacking is far less likely since the people most interested in hacking these machines would be those most interested in making a statement. The effort involved in subtle vote manipulation the kind that you can get away with, the kind that political machines exist for, is the far more practical danger, and the one that is routinely overlooked in the rush to denounce touch screen voting.
Although you can hack a machine to massage the vote subtly, it makes less sense than using the systems that have existed for years to massage the vote. Voter suppression, voter confusion, and double voting leave far less visible trails and result in far more acceptable results.
George Bush didn't need to steal his elections because he had a significant number of supporters. In a tight race when massaging the vote can give or deny victory, the outcome is less in dispute as a significant number of people are pleased with the outcome. In a race that isn't tight, massaging the vote can increase the margin of victory to silence your opponent. Out right theft of the vote leads to, well, documentaries on HBO. Simply put, the machines that run elections aren't that smart, and they aren't that stupid either. Criminals do not want to be caught, and so they make sure their crimes go unnoticed. If a criminal is committing a crime in the open, as rewriting numerous ballots would do, the criminal either wants to get caught (hackers looking to make a point) or Doesn’t care if people realize he's a thief (blood thirsty dictators for example, of which despite rumors to the contrary Mr. Bush is not). If the 2004 or 2000 elections were held today, Bush would not win, but they weren't held to day they were held when bush's numbers were neck and neck with his opponents. If there was massaging, it did occur on both sides and in levels that could be explained away. That's how the machines work, and that's how the game is played.
regardless of the system used, touch screen, pin and gear, scantron, etc. the machine to worry about is the one that decides which votes get counted and which do not, and that machine isn't manufactured by Diebold.
If you want a solution, voting should be controlled by a federal authority, and manipulation of the vote should be a crime of treason. However, since all elected officials owe their current positions at least partly to the real vote machines, it's unlikely that kind of reform will occur.