Of course, conservatives aren’t alone in fear of conspiracies. The fact that computerized voting machines are often manufactured and run by large corporations, whose owners tend to skew Republican, has been a topic of discussion amongst liberals ever since electronic voting machines have been in wide use.
It’s flaring up again, based on this article on what is (as far as I can tell) a pretty liberal website, telling of the head honchos of the company running the machines in the Ohio, who’ve apparently supported Mitt Romney.
Granted, this is a lot more likely to be true than most 9/11 or JFK theories, but right now, it’s still a conspiracy theory, especially since, obviously, nothing’s actually happened yet. But what do you make of all this?
On a practical note, is there anything actually stopping the people involved from doing what this article fears, besides a huge lead for Obama in Ohio before Election Day? If not, should there be? If so, what?
Machines with porprietary, closed source software which you aren’t allowed to examine, on machines which leave no paper trail and are known to be easily hackable and owned by companies whose executives have been outspoken in favour of one political party, having famously promised to deliver a state for Bush and such like.
I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, but if we’re worried about undermining faith in the electoral system it’s a hell of a lot more likely to cause that than the almost total nonexistence of voter-fraud.
I’d suggest reading this article, which points out how you can rig an election without rigging it at all. Send unreliable machines to black precincts, as he points out those areas are about five times as likely to have votes “lost” as white areas, you bias a vote in favour of the Republicans, because black votes aren’t Republican votes.
But even forgetting that, the whole idea of any paper-less voting machine relies on having complete trust in the industry which gave us the term “cover-up” (originating in Sequoia Voting Systems bribery of a Supreme Court judge).
It was very simple to rig Ohio for Dubya in 2004 by not giving Democratic leaning precincts enough voting machines. Lines over eight hours long developed in some. And that day, it was raining. (Happened to my daughter’s best friend trying to vote at Oberlin.)
The Diebold thing has been mentioned in the past. I doubt if it’s been completely debunked (difficult to prove a negative), but it also has never been proven true.
If the GOP ever actually gets caught at it, there’d be hell to pay.
All we know for sure about the Diebold machines in Ohio in 2004 is that someone in a position to rig them said that he would do everything possible to deliver votes to Bush. We do not know if he was actually telling the truth. However, just the fact that the situation is such that we can’t know is a huge problem, regardless of whether cheating occurred or not.