Two suspect elections and the country perceived by most Americans as heading in the wrong direction, have destroyed confidence in our electoral system and initiated the search for a way to secure the vote.
The fact that the sanctity of individual votes cannot be trusted obfuscates the panoply of fraudulent and illegal methods used to manipulate the last two national elections. Only by eliminating ballot box manipulation as a means of election fraud can we remove the red herring being used to direct us away from the more subtle fraud
Things like polling place location, voter lists and long lines at the polls are beyond the scope of this discussion. By narrowing our focus down to the most basic mechanism of democracy, the vote itself, we do not relieve ourselves of the conviction that any part of the voting process that is not open and transparent is subject to fraud.
This assumption is common to the myriad treatments and criticisms of the voting process proliferating on the airwaves and the internet today. The majority of the various solutions proposed in these forums share three additional assumptions: (note change from crucial tenets)
- The vote is the essential element from which our democracy emanates. The birthright of every citizen cannot be privatized, bastardized, or marketed.
- The value of computers in the processing of large quantities of data cannot be denied.
- What goes on inside a computer is an incomprehensible series of oohs, aahs, zips, and squiggles whose product is worthless unless its final form is words printed on paper.
The implementation of such a system has to be free from even the perception of conflicts of interest. Trust is what is at stake. To that end:
- All computer source code utilized in the voting process needs to be transparent, open to public scrutiny.
- Profitability as the primary motive for the implementation of any particular voting mechanism has to be unacceptable.
- Any computerized voting device must generate an durable record of the vote to provide a secure basis for a valid recount.
So that eliminates the likes of Diebold's Vote Snatcher at $3K per copy with its private entrance and its proprietary code whose secrecy conceals the negligent incompetence of its design. And it eliminates the other "now you see it, now you don't, but trust me anyway" devices that would not pass muster in a Las Vegas casino let alone the Great State of Georgia.
What's left? Let's clear off the bench and start over. What we have in mind is more like a toaster than a computer. And it is made with off the shelf components that are just about as common as the guts of a toaster, including the crumbs. It has just enough wit to know that it is a toaster, but no hard drive, no memory, no internet connection, no chat room, no place to nurse old grudges or hatch out plots to turn Pop Tarts into Wonder Bread. It has a screen but no image, a printer but nothing to print. An empty bubble, dreamless, thoughtless, infinitely patient, it waits for Election Day.