Soapbox

Who do you plan to vote for in November…

…and are you quite sure it will even matter?

Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world isn’t nuts!

Are you a one-in-a-hundred guy? If you vote on a Diebold voting machine, you just may be. A recent study of the new Diebold computerized machines in the Florida primaries found that one out of every one hundred votes cast were not counted by the machines! They were also 8 times more likely to tally votes incorrectly than the old paper and pencil voting ballots.

It was also proved that not only could these machines be tampered with to change the vote count, but they could be tampered with from a remote location, leaving no trail back to the hackers. Plus, despite the fact that these are ATM style machines, and we can all get receipts from our ATM, these machines currently can’t give a paper receipt to allow a re-count.

33 Ohio counties were scheduled to get Diebold machines to “improve” their voting process, but due to recent controversy, 27 of the 33 have withdrawn their Diebold contracts until such times as the gross inefficiency of these machines can be corrected.

So just when progress is being made toward more fair elections~ the buzz is that the government wants to find a way to “postpone” the November elections in the event of a terrorist attack. No kidding. The plan is being presented to Attorney General John Ashcroft, who apparently thinks he has the power to set up a procedure to do this under the Patriot Act. (This remains to be seen, but if he does, there’s one more thing to love about the Patriot Act)

The idea is that in the mass confusion following a big terror event, some people might not be able to get out to vote, let alone think clearly about who they’re voting for, so we should wait until the country is more settled down before we have an election On the surface that doesn’t sound too illogical, but does the plan pass the sniff test?
Here are a few things to think about on this subject, in addition to the interesting timing of this whole thing.

1) Letting the terrorists win: Kind of a minor thing, but aren’t you sort of letting the terrorists set the agenda for the elections if you say “well, if you guys blow something up we’ll allow it to disrupt our entire system of government as never before” ? I mean, didn’t Bush tell us after 9/11 that if we didn’t go shopping and take vacations and stuff we were “letting the terrorists win”? So how is it not doing that very thing if we give them the power to stop our election?

2) Never been necessary before: We made it through 2 world wars and a Civil War without ever needing to postpone an election… but if someone blows up an airport we must be ready to put democracy on hold? How weak have we become? Spain didn’t postpone their elections after the terrible tragedy they suffered. ..but they did vote out their incumbent government.

3) Is it Legal? The Constitution of the United States (remember the Constitution? It was in all the papers) states that the election shall be held on the 1st Tuesday after the 1st Monday…not may, but shall. Which sort of sounds like, short of a nuclear attack, it would take an ammendment to the ole Constitution to give someone in the federal government the authority to postpone the election. I could certainly be wrong- we’ll see what Constitutional scholars have to say about that.

4) Is it necessary?: The states already have the power to suspend their elections- NY did it for their primary which was being held on Sept. 11th 2001. If something really big were to happen, I believe the states could each vote to suspend their elections. (But it would have to be something really big, of course, to get them all to do it)

5) Asleep at the wheel? So how big of an attack are they expecting here? What are they doing to prevent it? Certainly not giving more money to the department of Homeland Security. And if they really thnk that, for example, LAX and JFK might get bombed the day before the elections- mightn’t that indicate that our “war President” is doing a crappy job and should be voted out?

6) Who makes the call? The chairman of the Federal Election Assistance Commission wants to be given the authority to throw the switch on this. Who is this guy? I believe Bush appointed him in ’02. What would be the criteria by which he could decide to change American history? How much openness and disclosure would there be about the factors that influenced this decision process? Shouldn’t we should find out? I don’t think it’s out of line to suggest that, given the current administration’s record of secrecy, this is something we should be verrry concerned about!