As most of you know, I've been a... Rather vocal participant in the election fraud discussions here in the wake of November 2nd. After a recent discussion with DemFromCT, I've come to the following conclusion: election fraud is AI.
There's a saying in computer science. I can never remember the exact wording, but it goes something like this. You can never achieve artificial intelligence, because as soon as you achieve any specific goal - be it computer vision, handwriting/pattern recognition, speech, learning, or whatever - it stops being AI. AI is a meaningless term for mysterious, murky human-like stuff we can't do yet.
Election fraud's the same kind of thing. We've had plenty of examples of things that could be called election fraud. People systematically prevented from voting, too few machines assigned, election officials not following the rules (during the election and recount), technicians tinkering with the machines unsupervised, etc. Yet somehow, none of these things qualify in our minds as election fraud, even though they concievably could have changed the outcome of the election. Why is that?
My theory is that they don't qualify because, as soon as you see evidence of a specific incident, it suddenly becomes too concrete and specific to be assigned such a grandiose label - rather like AI. Being humans, we have - frankly - a really horrendous inability to grasp how large, complicated systems interact. We look at a specific incident - like black polling places being systematically denied machines, or the Ohio recount people putting on a dog-and-pony show instead of doing a recount, or a computer looking at a digital image of a piece of paper and saying "That's the letter E" - and don't see how it relates back to the big, grandiose phrase. We don't really "grok" how all these little things come together and become the great big gradiose phrase, how a thousand different cuts from ballots that weren't cast or weren't counted killed the election instead of one big red button labeled "Bush Mandate" that Rove pushed at 9:00 PM Pacific Time on November 2nd.
Ballot box stuffing and anti-voter violence we understand. These are simple, direct forms of election fraud that our brains intuitively grasp. But the anti-democratic forces in this country have long since moved beyond these simplistic methods. Instead, they've developed and refined more subtle, insidious methods - things that can easily be hidden in the fog of procedural errors or inherent problems with the system.
The purpose of this diary isn't to argue one way or another. I'm merely attempting to point out that the level of proof being demanded all around before we cry "fraud" is far too high. Yes, many of the "fraud" people have fallen victim to the same thing. Even after uncovering multiple instances of fraud, we ignore it and continue to seek ever bigger fish. We need to keep investigating but, at the same time, we need to be screaming loudly about the systematic attempt in Ohio (and possibly nationwide?) to deny blacks and other minorities their voting rights. And we need to use the fraud label.