So when you vote, you'd like to know that the voting system is fixed, right? And after such a huge problem in 2000, you would think that four years later, we'd have a system and safety precautions in place to guarantee that something as simple as voting would be done right. Right?
Quoted:
"On a spectrum of terrible to very good, we are sitting at terrible," Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. "Not only have the vendors not implemented security safeguards that are possible, they have not even correctly implemented the ones that are easy." [emphasis mine]
How in the hell are we four years later with no real improvements nation-wide? We can invade not one but two other countries, we can give billions of dollars to rebuild said countries, but we can't allocate and spend enough money in a timely manner to make sure that our President is duly elected?
I think we should expect big problems next election. Since things are not fixed, and there are no real back-up plans in position, and no real accountability in place, you can bank that at the next election, it's going to get very ugly unless Kerry just wins by a landslide.
Here (Louisiana), we've had the electronic voting booths for a long time. (That's what happens when you have a state that is widely known for its polling corruption -- so much so that the federal government had to step in and mandate a change.) But even those don't make me feel terribly reassured because there were articles floating around after the last election about how easily enough those booths' totals could be manipulated by the people who owned the software, and, in the case of one of them breaking down, how those votes could just be erased. I think the software vulnerability alarmed a lot of people at the time, and after the news reported it, I'm sure most people thought it was being fixed, but I don't think it is (or even will be).
When this country is sitting on its hands again after the next election -- fighting over whether or not the Supreme court should get involved again, with no real leader, we're going to have to ask ourselves just who is winning this war on terror; how can a leader who professes to be against terror not make sure that the transition of power (or re-election to power) is done without jeopardy and without impunity?
You know, I find it so incredibly ironic that we're spending millions / billions of dollars "making sure that other countries have a democratic process" (yeah, right) and the same party in control of that is completely ignoring the fact that, as it stands, we don't have that here at home.
Posted by toni at May 5, 2004 01:25 PM