Electronic Fraud

Lunatic liberal that I am, I'm certainly not unhappy about yesterday's election results. I've been voting anti-Republican ever since they embraced the Religious Right and will continue to do so until these s.o.b's understand that Americans don't want to be dominated by right wing Christian extremism. Moderates like John McCain would tempt me should he run for President, and the few strange Democrats like Joe Lieberman disgust me, but until the GOP shakes those religious nuts out of its pockets, I'll vote a straight Democratic ticket whenever I can.

Of course I'd like to think that my anti-Republican vote gets recorded properly. Apparently at a few places around the country that wasn't always the case. Now we all understand that there will always be some level of fraud or attempts in that direction: aside from the normal greed and corruption we always have, many people have extremely strong feelings on certain issues and feel that electing the "wrong" candidate is so dangerous that they are willing to cast aside honesty to prevent such a "mistake". There are probably people on both sides who would accept "the ends justify the means" arguments, but I can't help feeling that the Religious Right provides more fertile ground for such activity..

Regardless, the sane majority probably agrees that votes should be counted honestly, always. We just hope that the electorate has enough community intelligence to avoid the really dangerous candidates most of the time. Some might say that's a lot of hope riding on a pretty weak horse, but so far it's either worked out or we've been damn lucky. Or maybe a little of both.

As we move more toward electronic voting machines, I am more concerned about fraud. On the one hand, it should be easier to build in more cross-checks and safeguards against fraud. But on the other side, if the software is compromised, it could be much harder to spot the problem and would definitely be so for "ordinary" folk: you need security experts to understand what happened and how.

Some say that compromises have already occurred. Maybe that's tin-foil hat territory, but everyone agrees that this could happen rather easily. That leaves me feeling rather queasy.. how about you?

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