In alt.religion.kibology, dbd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> Bill Shymanski <wtshyman@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >All the stuff I've been reading in comp.risks makes me wonder why
> >American elections need such gratuitious gadgetry. Is there some
reason
> >why American elections are more complicated or is it just more of the
> >spirit that brought us such innovations as the zipper and the wind-up
> >musical backscratcher?
>
> The Republicans, currently In Control of stuff, want to remain in
control,
> and don't want any nassssty paper trails to make people doubt that yes
of
> COURSE they won all those elections handily. That's my take on it. The
> Republicans of course own the company (just one, as I understand it)
that
> makes said electronic voting machines...
Yeeaaagh, Dave, Make it stop! From everything I've seen, the drive to
get these machines up and going, to avoid the overt appearance of a
Florida 2000, is a bipartisan effort. (Nevermind the covert Florida
2000s that will, indeed, be happening all over.) Besides, as it turns
out, when I joined the Bogeyman-de-jour Party, a.k.a. the GOP, I was not
immediately issued stock in the company that makes electronic voting
machines, any more than L. Ron Hubbard owns Earthlink from beyond the
grave (though perhaps he does if he's infesting the psyche of some poor
alien race on a future Earth, but that may be beside the point).
The fact is that these elections will be challenged in the courts
constantly until either a paper-trail is produced or aliens burn the
planet into a cinder, a cinder that stops lawyers. But as suggested
elsewhere in this thread, it seems more reasonable that Diebold et al.
has found a market niche populated by paranoid election officials who
either don't look as good as or don't like the party of Catherine
Harris, and so they don't want another ballot fiasco, the center star of
which turned out to be pieces of paper. Instead of training their poll
employees to clean out the damn punch machines in the first place,
they've decided to overshoot the mark and go for an idiot-proof system,
disregarding or getting overridden when it comes to the fact that it's
decidedly not immune to non-idiots. (Idiots may apply.)
-LAN3
Card-carrying non-idiot.
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