Letters to the Editor
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A long-awaited, much-needed wake up call
Thank you, Salon. This is the study (and the Salon article) I've been waiting to see for years.
Friedman understands the most crucial concept here, even if Farhad Manjoo has always been distracted from it: in our current system, elections can be stolen with relative ease. It should go without saying that this is totally unacceptable.
For every election, the burden of proof should indeed be on our government: to establish fair and secure election systems, to provide independent verification that these systems are not prone to tampering, and then to demonstrate convincingly that each election was accurately decided. "Trust, but verify."
Of course, that's a lot of work. It will take a lot of money to replace equipment, a lot of effort to train poll workers and observers, and a lot of time to conduct statistically valid, randomly-sampled recounts of every election to make sure the votes have been counted properly. I'm sure many Americans would rather just tell themselves that everything is fine, and that "you can't prove any election has been stolen recently." That's much less scary and less costly.
But consider the costs our government is authorizing to (purportedly) bring democracy to Iraq. Surely it's worth a fraction of those costs to safeguard our democracy here at home?