Sunday, August 03, 2008

New York Times gets it right on bad voting bill

I was surprised and pleased to see the New York Times get it right on the awful electronic voting bill proposed by Dianne Feinstein and Robert Bennett.

In the guise of protecting our vote, the bill instead strips away requirements for a paper record of the vote, and does not require that any records be audited. In other words, whatever the machine says is it, period. That would be a death knell for Democracy. I think most people have no idea how slim the thread by which their vote is hanging from has become. The poor thread is fraying badly, and we are truly in serious danger of losing a vote that actually counts. This bill would snip the thread and let our vote fall into an inauditable abyss.

Here's what the Op Ed page of the NYT has to say today - please read the whole thing.
Congress has stood idly by while states have done the hard work of trying to make electronic voting more reliable. Now the Senate is taking up a dangerous bill introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, that would make things worse in the name of reform. If Congress will not pass a strong bill, it should apply the medical maxim: first, do no harm.
Please contact your senators and representative and ask them to oppose the Feinstein/Bennett electronic voting bill.

1 Comments:

Blogger JJR said...

I have a cynical Anarchist friend who likes to say "If voting made any difference, they'd make it illegal" to which I always respond "Just wait".

Because the vote COULD make a difference, that's why all this crap is going down the way that it is: scrubbing voter rolls, black box e-voting, the whole shebang.

And even when the vote does make a difference, we have the grim reminders of 1963 and 1968...

Wasn't it Frank Zappa who said something along the lines of "The illusion of democracy shall be maintained so long as it is profitable. Once it's no longer profitable, the curtain will go up, the house lights will go up, the set will be struck, and the audience will be left staring at the blank brick wall at the back of the theater."

That may not be it exactly, but it's something like that. Great quote.

2:05 PM  

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