Other than offering up so few worthy candidates, the American voting system is hamstrung by another major defect – electronic voting machines. These Rube Goldberg devices cannot be made more secure than those who program them or have access to them. Consequently, when used, elections are not secure.
They were pushed on us after Florida 2000 due to the hanging chad fiasco. The first suspected theft of elections by their use happened shortly thereafter in Georgia and Alabama in 2002. (Don Siegelman, who likely won the Alabama election, is a political prisoner at this time.) Exit polling was widely variant of vote results in 2004, likely giving George W. Bush his second stolen election.
I used to care more about such matters until I realized that there was so often nothing to gain by electing a Democrat over the other party. And anyway, the 2008 election appeared clean, with little deviation from exit polls and actual vote count. Whatever happened in ’04 did not repeat.
Tracy Campbell has a nice little book, Deliver the Vote, published in 2004, about how common election fraud has been throughout our history. I remember the reaction at the time to the book: “No, that doesn’t happen here.” End of curiosity.
But it would be nice to be able to trust election outcomes. The 2011 race for Supreme Court Justice in Wisconsin saw David Prosser, a usual-suspect type right winger, win when thousands of votes were found uncounted on an election official’s computer. It was just enough to put him beyond recount range.
That smells, of course, and could happen in any election where the machines are not kept under constant surveillance and lock and key, where programming is not open source, and where there are no random audits of results to assure integrity.
Also, there needs to be paper ballots* to be counted and checked against the machines, which are often arithmetically challenged. Or, as an alternative, we might just use paper ballots. As a commenter noted at the linked article below about the decision by Ireland to scrap their machines, a pencil and paper is also technology.
American elections, besides usually being a joke for lack of substance, are also a joke for lack of security.
Just ask the Irish.
_________
*There are different types of machines – some are scanners that count ballots fed through them. Others are self-contained, merely a touch screen presented to a voter with the words at the top … “Trust me.” There is no other record kept, which is absurd.
Piece of Mindful 