I've resisted (until today) looking at any of the (many) articles about the jimmied vote problem. I relented when I saw this:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804A.shtml
at Truth Out. Yikes! Stolen again? Will Kerry's famous 10,000 Demo lawyers respond, or will we get some mushy, dissipated version of Gored Al, standing before the senate, bringing down the mallet on every member of the Congressional Black Caucus? "No inquiry allowed!"
It's not as though the solutions are not available.
Ya know, it's not like common sense won't, at the very least, provide the impetus to ask the right questions - they've been asked a million times, in as many contexts. What rational institutional exec would fail to demand; 1. bulletproof backup, 2. hardcopy audit trails? We know how and have known for over a decade. Sure, fuckups occur, but barring criminal intent (Arthur Anderson, Enron, et. al.), which, in itself is endemic, better intentions have aggressively worked to assure themselves and their auditors that relevant truth won't be swallowed or corrupted by the tools they use for hyper-speed counting.
Back in April, 1980, my wife and I bought what we believe to be the first "PC" (they weren't called that then) used by a small business (a wood stove shop) in our small Ohio town. It was a TRS-80. Neither IBM nor Microsoft were factors in the market then. The Internet wasn't even a gleam in daddy's eye. The software was strictly BASIC and free of graphics. We used very serviceable accounting, inventory control, spreadsheet, and database programs. Because of the graphics-free, black-and-white format, Speed was no problem. All this with 16K (that's "K"!) of RAM and two 120K external disc drives! We always had backup and hard copy. We would not have spent $5,000+ had we not been assured of it in advance. Now, If new-mother wife (which is why we bought the damn thing in the first place, as parenting and manual business management seem to require more than the routine 24 hrs.) and I had the foresight and intuition to stand on a retail floor, wiggling baby in arms, asking all sorts of very pertinent questions, including several versions of, "How the hell do we know how the info we've got is; 1. True? and 2. Replicable? and 3. Secure?", to a salesman whose congenital motive is to sell the damn thing, no matter what, then why are we allowing our representatives to feign this as some head-scratching, unsolvable problem? Cris-sakes! I think I'm living in a driveling, insane jar of a nation!
Any thoughts on how to give this issue political traction? If we cannot democratize our elections, all other progressive candy bars will eventually melt in our hands.
Cheers!