It’s nice to feel as though I still can learn something new every day. Every once in a while, though, there’s something I wish I hadn’t learned, because it chips away at my feeling of security and safety in this world where so many things I’ve taken for granted have been taken away.
Today I learned that some of these newfangled electronic voting machines use wireless technology to communicate voting information.
Hello?
What???
Excuse me?!?
Who was the schmuck that thought this would be a good idea? Think about your experience with wireless communication. When I think about mine, my head just shakes back and forth, making a wobbodeewobbodeewobbo sound. My spittle flies clear across the room in disbelief. I mean, come on! I use a laptop to wirelessly communicate with a cable modem, and the connection gets sketchy when I walk near a running dishwasher, someone turns on the TV, someone else uses a phone, or the microwave goes on to pop some popcorn or heat up somebody’s tea. I use a cordless phone and a cell phone to communicate wirelessly, and I get dropped signals and static-cursed sound all the time. If I move to the wrong space in the house, I hear some excited preacher on AM radio through the speaker. This is usually tolerable, because I can try to reload a web page again, or I can call someone over when a phone call has been dropped, or I can move away from the microwave oven until the popcorn is done popping.
In other words, when I use wireless communication on a day to day basis, I can give up, move away from the problem and try again because it’s OK for little bugs in the system to pop up. The convenience of writing a blog post while sitting in the hallway watching my kids impersonate bunnies makes those glitches worthwhile. But the legitimacy of our voting system is dependent upon the confidence of voters that every single last vote will be properly recorded and properly counted, every time, without fail, millions of times over on a single day. There’s no “do-over” with an election. Anybody who designs voting technology has got to make sure that every single last vote will be recorded and counted correctly, every time, without fail, millions of times over. In that school gym next to the loudspeaker. In the church cafeteria with the microwave in the alcove right next door. In the Masonic lodge that sits under the radio tower. Everywhere, every time, without fail.
And that’s just thinking about mistakes! What about purposeful tampering? These are wireless signals we’re talking about. Wireless signals can be intercepted — what does that do to the secret ballot? Wireless signals can be jammed, and wouldn’t it be convenient if certain polling stations in certain areas that vote certain ways just had awfully mysterious logistical problems for a few hours until someone found that device in the bush outside the window, if they found it at all? Wireless signals can also be sent from an unauthorized source, which could also prove highly convenient to certain parties.
Don’t tell me the voting machine people have every possible problem with wireless communications figured out and tamped down. I mean, think about computer viruses: legions of well-paid geniuses have been working on stamping out computer viruses for some twenty years now, and pimply high school sophomores are still cackling with glee as they unleash havoc. I imagine those with an interest in hacking elections would have more resources at their disposal than the high school sophomores.
Oh, yeah, here’s the kicker: how will we find out when there’s been a problem, if voters don’t get a receipt verifying their vote, and if there isn’t a generated paper trail to record results non-electronically? Answer: we won’t.
You all know I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I generally scoff at people who say George W. Bush was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, and I have no patience for people who say they’ve proven that the Ohio vote in 2004 was stolen. But you don’t need to have proof that an election was stolen in order to have a corrosion of confidence in a voting system. And if people have lost confidence that the people in power were legitimately elected, then those people will lose confidence in the legitimacy of the underlying democracy. When that happens, all bets are off.
Americans deserve confidence in their voting system. The installation of machines with wireless communications and no paper trail doesn’t help.
