More Hope for 2004?

Almost lost in the hoo-haw about Clark leading Bush in the most recent poll was the fact that the same poll also said Bush's overall approval rating is at its lowest point since he became President. This means there's more hope than ever that whoever ends up as the democratic nominee will actually beat Bush. And according to Richard Goldstein, increasing numbers of liberals and progressives agree: We'll do whatever it takes to get Bush out of office:

For the first time since the '60s, radicals are willing to break bread with the Democratic mainstream. What accounts for this change? In a word, experience. The coalescing of free marketeers and fundamentalists into a potent right-wing political force has driven the left to reconsider its usual strategy of divide and be conquered. "Too often, progressives were unwilling to act together on anything until they agreed on everything," says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation . "That is gone. We can hold two visions in our mind. There's the long-term building of a movement, but in the short term this is the worst government the country has ever had. Imagine what Bush would do with even a tiny mandate. We've seen what he can do with no mandate. We've got to move on that basis."

Clark, Dean, even Kerry—all fine with me, I guess. None are perfect, but all are better than the Dismal Failure. Ridgeway's article gives a good overview of the campaign field at this point, including some insight into how the Democratic "party establishment" figures in the whole circus. (Lame ending, though.)

On the darker side, it could be argued that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just gave the finger to equal protection by saying that it's just fine for less wealthy voting districts to lose more votes than more wealthy districts. Worse, some have been arguing for some time that the end of exit polling and the rise of electronic voting machines spells the end of democracy because these developments leave us with no way to assess the validity or accuracy of election results. Now, Salon's Farhad Manjoo is calling optical scanning and touch screen voting systems "an open election to fraud." For one thing, it seems the CEO of Diebold (one of the leading manufacturers of these voting machines) is a staunch Bush supporter and fundraiser. For another, researchers have found "that Diebold's voting software is so flawed that anyone with access to the system's computer can change the votes without leaving any record." And apparently gaining access to the system's computer is fairly easy—not just for elections officials, Diebold employees, or "the janitor," but also for anyone with an internet connection and some mad hacker skilz. According to the researcher, the Diebold system is basically swiss cheese:

I got a call from one of our more brilliant computer programmers -- he's got quite a few advanced degrees -- and he called me on a weekend and he said, "I want you to go to your computer." And he walked me through it just like a support tech does -- open this panel, click this, do this, do that. And as I'm doing this it was appalling how easy it was. Once you know the steps, a 10-year-old can rig an election. In fact it's so easy that one of our activists, Jim March in California, put together a "rig-a-vote" CD. He's been going around showing it to elections officials, and now this CD has been making its way to Congress members.

It's shocking. All you do is double-click the icon. You go backwards through the Internet to that county computer, and if you have Microsoft Access on your machine you can walk right into that election database while it's open. It's configured for multiple access at the same time. You can be in there changing things and you can change anything you want.

Does democracy have any meaning when a 10-year-old could rig an election? I mean, Diebold is one of the largest providers of touch-screen voting systems, and their systems have so little security it almost sounds like they were designed to be easy to hack.

So we know punch cards lose a far higher percentage of votes than these other systems, yet we also know that Diebold's systems are completely insecure and provide no paper trail or any other check on their accuracy. So tell me again, what's the point of voting?

Posted September 24, 2003 06:07 AM | election 2004