Everyone admits to being worried about these wretched machines and what effect they'll have on this election, but I'm worried SICK. An unreliable election -- even just one, or one that's unreliable in any detail, however slight -- is not a detail; it's the ball game. It knocks EVERYTHING into a cocked hat. The campaign, the polls, even GOTV -- none of it matters if the votes are lost, stolen, or tampered with. And everything I read and hear about these machines says they're practically an invitation for that sort of interference.
AND NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS. About the closest to an intelligent discussion about this I can find is HBO's documentary about Diebold, which seems to confirm that the machines are a disaster waiting to happen. Not exactly comforting. People's reaction generally to the situation seems to be to say, "Oh, well, there's nothing we can do about it anyway; might as well just hope for the best." I've even seen people on this blog attacked for bringing it up, as if they were spoiling the party. But this is pure denial, and it's unacceptable. There's GOT to be something we can do -- right?
I'd like to open up a conversation about these terrible machines generally. Perhaps a good place to start would be how we ever got into a situation where we're this dependent on them. Then maybe we'd have a handle on how to get out of it.
Another topic might be one of the ways in which the machines are troublesome. I can think of at least four. The first three I've seen discussed; the fourth I've never heard ANYONE discuss.
The first is that the Diebold company apparently has a considerable Republican bias. The implications of this are troubling for obvious reasons, particularly for us Democrats -- though I'd like to think there are still some Republicans out there of sufficient decency and good faith that they'd be troubled by it too.
The second issue is that like many computers (but more than most), the machines are apparently quite unstable. They tend to erase votes, reverse them, or fail to count them in the first place. This issue, being random on its face, ought to be worrying Republicans just as much as Democrats.
The third issue is that the machines are so easily hacked. This can be done either physically or via software. In a climate where as many people are as dishonest about elections as there are now -- even election officials, for heaven's sake -- then this is perhaps the most worrisome of the three issues, especially since any such hack is likely to be undetectable.
And the fourth issue is that because the machines, incredibly, generate no paper record, ALL this is undetectable. If only they presented some alternate, verifiable means of keeping count, none of the other three issues might matter. But as it is, if fraud is being committed, or if mechanical errors are occurring, we'll never know one way or the other.
How did we get to this pass? And what can we do about it?
Anybody?