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Read other letters about this article
If I were to propose to count political election votes in secret, nobody would or should trust that. Today, instead of a single person or committee retiring to a back room to do the secret counting, a corporate vendor hides behind touch screen software to do the counting invisibly and secretly.
Touch screen balloting results are taken completely on faith and counted in secret.
That sets up a wall of secrecy around the most public of all functions, vote counting. It removes evidence since even electronic ballots are often claimed to be in proprietary formats and so are "trade secrets."
Once the wall of secrecy is set up around vote counting, a couple things necessarily result:
1. There's no basis for confidence in the results of elections.
2. Concerned citizens are forced to make educated guesses about what's going on behind the wall of vote counting secrecy, using limited available information, as they must.
3. As a result of the above secrecy plus citizen activism, Manjoo, and his supporters accuse the concerned citizens of being "conspiracy theorists" for doubting the results of this process and amassing available information.
It seems clear to me that at least under these circumstances the "conspiracy theory" attack is a DE FACTO protection of secrecy that really shouldn't exist.
But the real issue, one that changes everything, is the secret vote counting.
Maybe Manjoo is somewhat right or totally right but nevertheless deeply mistaken, in that it is no longer possible to prove anything regarding elections, they have slipped from the people's control and sight, but instead we bicker amongst ourselves. In fact, you can't prove that Bush won, except to state the numbers and demand belief from the skeptics.
Jefferson thought that all issues should be argued at the bar of public reason. Would love if Manjoo would help us get to that point.
Anybody who thinks stolen elections are not a big risk probably doesn't love America because you just don't "get" the attraction of controlling America to the corruptible. Or, perhaps many of us don't get that stealing an election is DOING JUSTICE for the zealots among us, who recognize all too painfully the consequences of the wrong side winning.
While conspiracy theories are necessarily quite often wrong, the anti-conspiracy theory folks are so committed to a form of naivete that it's hard to get a real debate going, and we miss what is perhaps the biggest development in democracy in over a century: secret vote counting. It may succeed because we don't have mechanisms to stop all the action and listen to this danger. In other words, if democracy has any real sentinels, they are not being listened to. Maybe they're making some flawed arguments, but arguments about stolen or not stolen miss the real story.
It seems to me that to have votes counted in secret by a political enemy is the picture of tyranny. To have them counted by a friend: the picture of corruption. To argue over who won and who lost in such a situation? Diversion, camouflage, tragedy -- we can only guess.
Elections are now pure Rohrschack test. Whether you've got no evidence, or some evidence but not enough to change the result, or even when you've enough to change the result you will be denounced as a partisan sour grapes loser. So, what this plainly means is that no matter what the level of damage to democracy, no one will do anything about it.
Who will put a stop to the bickering while democracy burns?
The favor of a reply by Mr. Manjoo is requested.
Could this forum somehow help bring this issue, which is bigger than the debate here so far, to the fore?
