I know. Many of us in the left blogosphere have long warned of the
looming train wreck of an election that may result from the prospect that the votes of so many this year will be counted by electronic voting machines like those manufactured by Diebold.
But now it appears even some conservatives are growing worried that this year's election may result in unprecedented chaos and conflict. One of them is Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is concerned enough to make the following prediction:
Brace yourselves: Troubled as its election was, we could end up looking with envy at Mexico.
Follow me below the fold to see what's making even a conservative apologist for Republican (mis)rule so concerned ...
... about the way so many of us will cast our vote in this year's election.
For starters, the fact that electronic voting machines haven't shown themselves to be very reliable or dependable:
... So here is a nightmare of nightmares: The House hangs in the balance, and the districts that make the difference cannot do recounts because there is no paper trail; the paper trail in jurisdictions that have it find huge discrepancies between it and the numbers recorded on the machines; screw-ups like Montgomery County's, or worse, disenfranchise large numbers of voters and make any outcome seem less legitimate; jurisdictions across the country lack established procedures for handling disputed elections and get mired in litigation or gridlock; and partisan election officials (à la Florida Republican Rep. Katherine Harris) make decisions that produce outcomes that are questionable at best.
This is not fanciful; it is all too real. And the reality would be even worse than the litany above suggests. All of the horrors above actually could occur with machines that are widely considered to be benign and safe from any corrupting influences. But we do not have such machines.
To all who have not yet done so, I urge you to look at the video of Princeton University researchers corrupting a widely used Diebold voting machine in less than one minute and creating a virus that alters results, spreads from one machine to another and corrupts the whole network, and disappears without a trace after the elections are over. [...]
A study by experts of voting in the 2006 primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where touch-screen machines with paper trails are used, found huge differences in results between the machines' internals and the paper trails--and they found that many of the Smart Cards that record precinct results got lost on the way to the central office, resulting in incomplete results.
There's much, much more and I urge you to read his entire article, or at least the second half of it devoted to election integrity issues. He goes on at great length about the many other problems with our voting system to which electronic machines contribute, with a decent discussion of the recent foul ups in the Maryland primary elections. It's a very fair and even handed critique for the most part, and certinly welcome. I'm especially happy to see him refer favorably to the Princeton Study video, and his suggestion that his readers go view it (even though he doesn't provide the necessary link to assist those who wish to follow through on his suggestion).
Let's email Mr. Ornstein (nornstein@aei.org) to thank him for his concern, and further ask if perhaps he might consider turning this part of his column into an op-ed peice for the Washington Post or New York Times. After all, these bastions of our So-Called Liberal Media might actually print something about election integrity issues if a conservative is the one who writes about it.