Land Shark On Misleading Media Manipulation of Elections

kpete

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Fri Nov-03-06 12:27 AM
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Land Shark On Misleading Media Manipulation of Elections

Edited on Fri Nov-03-06 12:54 AM by kpete

Kpete: While Time magazine condescends to tell Americans they should just 'get used to' electronic voting rather than complaining about it, Land Shark shows that Time magazine "just doesn't get it" on e-voting, as is typical of mainstream media coverage. When will the MSM start making the more salient and powerful points on this subject?

There are problems with e-voting much greater than "human error" and "fuss of Democrats."
These are the only two Michael Duffy noted in Time's "Can This Machine Be Trusted"?
Time overlooked entire fields of problems that exist with electronic voting. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1552054,00.html

Most problematic is the system's reliance on "public confidence,"which Time lends its hand to promoting, instead of doing objective journalism. As a consumer fraud attorney, I know that "confidence" is required only for a fraud or a trick, it's the key element of deception. On the other hand, in a fair contracting process, due diligence requires all parties checking out each significant detail. Similarly, Election systems require full transparency and verifiability - unless fraud is the goal or condoned byproduct.

In the past, ballots were cast in secret; but votes counted in a transparent observable process. With electronic voting, America's votes are now shifted to counting in secrecy, via claims of corporate software trade secrecy, leaving no rational basis for confidence in the election results. No actual person sees or verifies the actual vote counts, we just fall down in slavish devotion to magic machine numbers.

Moreover, computerized voting and tabulating systems, like all computers, do what they are told to do without regard to law or ethics. Testing and certification processes in place have never discovered problems because they simply can't, nor can they ever prove the validity of elections. Malicious computer programs can easily be designed to appear only on election day, change election results, and then disappear without a trace. The fact that the code wasn't in place or operating under test conditions and therefore the test of a small number of ballots seemed to be OK tells us nothing about what happened under actual election conditions, when riggers or hackers are striking. Besides, with government money and power determined entirely by elections, the most likely rigger or hacker suspect is the government itself.

Challenges by "losers" are criticized by Time. Does anyone seriously believe that WINNERS can be trusted to challenge their own victories? Only losers are motivated, so shaming the losers has the undemocratic result of leaving democracy defenseless. Crediting only Democrats for raising the e-voting issue disserves Republicans who have historically owned the "you can't trust government" argument. Republicans have a point, in elections.

E-voting allows the perfect means for those in power to maintain that power secretly and illegitimately. Fraudulent results like a flip from 52-48 to 48-52 are readily rationalized by any pundit as legit. Is this defending democracy: knee-jerk rationalizations based on blind faith results? Real defenders, scientists and prosecutors, like sentinels, investigate first and then conclude later.

Time closes by suggesting we all "get used to" evoting instead. But "modern" computers create precisely the wrong condition (invisibility and non-transparency). In contrast, an August 2006 Zogby poll says 92% support the public's right to witness and obtain information on vote counting, regardless of political orientation. By that standard, election officials and Time magazine are out of touch with every single demographic in America. This augurs poorly for their attempts at leadership in democratic elections.

---Paul Lehto
Attorney at Law
lehtolawyer@gmail.com
425-422-1387

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