Where the hell is everybody?
When I saw this story, I assumed the leftosphere would go in to full-on outrage mode:
Yet with a few exceptions, the story seems to have sunk beneath the waves of convention and McMansion fervor.
Oh, and our election watchdogs tasked with preventing such outrages? They want to solve the manifold problems with these systems -- by lowering the bar electronic voting machines have to clear. And that would be the Democrats I am talking about.
I used to be amused. But now I'm just disgusted.
IOW, the tin foil hat brigade has now had its core premise validated by the worst presumed offender. IOW, the basic premise of our political system has been revealed to be a lie -- not by a wide-eyed conspiracy theorist, but by the key conspirator.
A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.
The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.
The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.
Yet with a few exceptions, the story seems to have sunk beneath the waves of convention and McMansion fervor.
Oh, and our election watchdogs tasked with preventing such outrages? They want to solve the manifold problems with these systems -- by lowering the bar electronic voting machines have to clear. And that would be the Democrats I am talking about.
I used to be amused. But now I'm just disgusted.
posted by bluememe at 8/25/2008
3 Comments:
Maybe the Democrats Who Profit are no longer able to identify with the Democrats who vote. If the system has been thoroughly corrupted, recognition of reality leads to contempt. A corruptible but dispersed electoral system is replaced by a system that centralizes and streamlines the corruptibility, moving it toward the top? That must sound good to anyone who aspires to take control.
McCain is in Iraq to win? No one knows what that means. George Bush did not win the 2000 election, but he won the shriveled hearts of the Supreme Court. Cheney, following his disastrous tenure as the active head of Halliburton, can state truthfully that since he occupied the vice presidency, he has been winning every day. The defective voting machines were shielded throughout the period that future generations will curse as the era of Bush the Lesser.
Next to such major disasters, people who imagine themselves to be Players can't shed a tear for each vote lost, even if it's for them.
The Republicans are the undisputed NASCAR of the disaster industry. Without the opportunity to steal, they would find no reason to participate in the political process. I don't know if there is hope for all the Democrats, but maybe it would be worthwhile for their constituents to ask or, better yet, demand (if that's still possible): Show me that you believe in democracy and that you're not an idiot. Make sure that any change in the electoral system makes it more transparent and more reliable, not less so.
The big contributors call the shots, but maybe some Democratic officeholders yearn for their lost dignity.
I think everyone is in Denver.
I'm not getting how the Democrats are pushing for lowering the bar, but I don't have a whole lot of time tonight to do much reading.
Also, I think there is a lot of...what's that word? Issue fatigue? It's like after Suskind's book, someone could publish a video on YouTube with a date stamp of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld planning their deception and all across the internet, there would be one big giant collective yawn and the muffled voices of those of us left that care.
The camel keeps getting stronger with each new straw and it seems it will pass through the eye of a needle long before its back ever breaks.
O-bam-a! O-bam-a!
But then, have you ever heard that Bill Hicks bit about what happens when you get elected president in this country? If I remember correctly, you are taken to a dark room with a movie screen. The curtains pull back and show the Zapruder film (probably with the missing frames).
When the movie finishes, the lights go up and an unseen voice comes over the loudspeaker and asks, "Any questions?"
Also - the thing that kills me the most is relatively speaking, this software would be so simple to write. I've seen very good designs in the open-source web sites that make it very accurate, very difficult to cheat, and contain a double blind system for verifying your vote, and a paper trail.
I bet you the good folks at Google could come up with a kick butt solution in two weeks.
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