There is no reason I can understand for state officials or voting machine manufacturers not to be concerned and cooperative about security issues.
There's one I can understand with very little difficulty, but none dare speak its name.
I just heard from someone who believes that the election is fixed. This kind of story make sit hard to argue with that.
The Democrats don't seem to be bothering to deal with this issue, either.
I can't see any reason for anyone to oppose more secure voting procedures other than ill-intent. So I'm paranoid, but what other explanation is there?
It depends on your idea of "ill intent" whether this qualifies, but I would not discount the effect of petty insecurity, power plays, and anxiety over that which one does not understand. If you're a little confused and not too competent, you're going to resent and resist any attempt to disrupt the status quo, especially if it threatens to put you in the public eye. Don't rock the boat; I don't have the foggiest idea how to swim.
1, 2: That's the thing. Nefarious reasons for resisting a paper trail make sense to me. I literally can't come up with anything else rational -- the only non-nefarious motive I can come up with is some sort of personal pique.
Pwned by Fox. But how long can that sort of petty insecurity be an explanation in the face of rational concerns? People have been bitching about this intently and rationally since 2000.
Bush "knows" he is going to keep both houses, just like he "knew" he was going to be re-elected. Sometimes Bush doesn't lie, when he can accompany the truth with a smirk and a dare.
This was a good post. Now I understand why Democrats aren't fighting very hard. They have all the voting systems in their pocket. Dems will never be able to prove much.
The fight may not start for a few more elections. When it starts, voting machines will be the least of it. If it starts.
You might be interested in this paper: Why Information Security is Hard: An Economic Perspective. In principle, it is in Diebold's own interest to make its products secure, because that's what the customers want. But when you look more closely at the incentives, the picture is less clear. Security is hard to measure and expensive to achieve; and there are other factors that conflict with security, such as Diebold's maneuvering to dominate the market and lock in customers (I'm just using Diebold as an example, every company does this).
In the end, I can believe that Diebold's actions are motivated by self-interest, not malice. The solution is to somehow change their incentives. For instance, Microsoft now takes security much more seriously than they used to, and the change happened when security concerns became more important than the other factors affecting their sales and profits. I don't think Diebold is in that situation yet.
Diebold's motives aren't the most imporant thing -- why do people buy Diebold machines? Why are they allowed to sell bad machines? Etc.
Data point: One night I met a Diebold sales rep at a bar. He was a dick and spent a lot of time babbling about Jesse-Jackson-led conspiracies.
This post makes me even more pessimistic about November 7th.
Stories like this are certainly bad, but let's have some perspective, folks. If there's one thing I took away from our attempt at collective action on this issue, it's that things are actually a lot better than most people realize; people hear stories about this sort of pressure and assume conditions like this are general all over the country, so they despair, but most states already have voting systems that are quite good according to the people who keep close track of this stuff, and the struggle seems to have come down to the Diebold Diehards (so to speak), who do all this crazy stuff that gets into the papers. So yes, there are some big problems remaining, but it's not as bleak as you might think.
Stop oppressing everyone with your "hope" and your "unicorns", teo.
12 comments. Eveyone so careful not to appear a nutcase, huh. Next thing ya know the weirdos will be imagining torture and permanent detention. Must not encourage suspicion:we have a liberal process to protect; our faith is why it works.
Bah.
We've had plenty of threads on this issue with hundreds of comments.
LB, you realize you and Instapundit are in complete agreement on the need for voting security, paper trails, etc., right? This is an issue everyone should support. Is that Unfogged project to report on voting standards state by state still in the works?
My newfound meta-paranoia is that the voting systems have been set up to be just insecure enough so that even without actual tampering, in the event of a Democratic win (say, this November), their Republican opponents can cast doubt on the result, and perhaps force some kind of do-over until the "right" result emerges.
LB, you realize you and Instapundit are in complete agreement on the need for voting security, paper trails, etc., right?
And yet why do I get the impression that Instapundit's stance, even if genuinely held, would have no affect on his actions whatsoever?
Off-topic, but is anyone else worried about this sort of thing?
18: A bit, yeah. In California, at least, the word seems to be out about Prop 90 on the left; the big question in my mind is how southern California conservatives will vote.
11: I don't actually find that all that cheery. You don't need control of many counties to fix an election -- look at what happened in Palm Beach (there, probably an accident) in 2000. One county, a couple of thousand votes, and there goes the state.
15: Good for Insty. I don't understand why anyone at all opposes it, though.
For a presidential election, sure, but congressional elections are different.
A representative here, a representative there -- pretty soon it runs into money.
Do I have to go back through that collective action thread and find the links that show which states have done what? All I'm saying is that people often frame this as "look at this awful stuff these people here are doing, I guess they're just going to steal the election" when people have, in fact, been working diligently to improve voting systems and have made a lot of progress so far.
LizardBreath, I've been reviewing my social history texts and thinking about what I learned in college and since about why people do profoundly stupid things. This is therefore semi-informed speculation. :)
Everyone who's part of the political establishment but outside the Cheney-and-buddies machine is fodder for status anxiety, the creeping dread of knowing that they're losing prestige. They have no real power of their own, and won't as long as the machine can grind out some more tunes; all they have is their ability to stand closer to power than the rest of us. And any cleaning of house thorough enough to get the machine out is going to take out a lot of them, it seems reasonable to conclude - systemic changes are seldom razor-focused, and besides, for those likely to do any house-cleaning, the Democratic and media establishments are part of the problem even when less actively malevolent than the machine.
In recent years I've come to feel that for at least some of its members, the decayed remains of the vital-center hegemony, the network of political and social elites who see their role as acting in loco parentis for the rest of us and who continually get rolled by the machine for it, the belief in their system is as totalizing as for any hardcore Marxist or fundamentalist. That is, it explains _everything_ worth considering about how the world work: the sinful past, the turbulent present, the possible redeemed future, it's all there. No part of it can peel away without calling the totality into question. Which means that there are a lot of reporters, editors, and administrative aides in roughly the position of a diehard Marxist looking at the Hitler-Stalin pact, or a fundamentalist watching a child suffer and perhaps die from a mutated antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria. The evidence is there, but accepting it means losing _everything_.
So they turn with ever-escalating fury on the evidence, as long as possible.
Once the thought dawned on me, it seemed pretty plausible. The hard part was (for me, raised around JPL and Caltech, and so accustomed to a moderately liberal technocracy as background noise for social considerations) simply recognizing how much goals like moderation and equanimity can also serve totalizing purposes.