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By Ben Tripp, CounterPunch
This nation is not a Super Slurpee, Mr. President. With that said, let's pretend there isn't an American attack on a sovereign nation in the offing, that Europe is still among America's allies, and global warming is just a paranoid speculation by all those diaper-butt scientists. Let's pretend the space shuttle touched down in the usual manner, Al Qaeda isn't gearing up for another urban planning project, and North Korea is very, very sorry about all those naughty threats it made and even as we speak they're hammering their swords into ploughshares--although what they could possibly want with ploughshares when nothing grows in their country, I cannot surmise. In other words, let's pretend -and we will be pretending so hard the veins will stand out like whipcords in our necks--that all is well with the rest of the world. That still leaves some shall we call them difficulties? Difficulties here at home. And they're not going to go away until we pry open Pandora's Black Box: the voting machines.
Because the American Experiment, as it is known, ended on November 4, 2002.
Not much has been made of this, but it seems like a noteworthy subject. Until that day, this country had a pretty simple system for choosing its leaders: candidates ran against each other for public office, and then the voters would come out in very small droves to vote for the candidate with the most money. There were anomalies that tested the efficacy of the system once in a while, if efficacy is the word I want. It might be defecation. I'll have to look it up. But in general the arrangement was unsatisfactory to everyone, and so we kept it. Then a strange thing happened. During a race for the presidency, the loser won.
This had happened before: there's a thing called the Electoral College, and it's how the Electoral College votes that actually determines who shall be president. It's a peculiar system and isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but the premise is that each state has a bunch of electors who get together and vote, and these votes are sent on to Washington. Ideally this college, which doesn't offer diplomas or student loans, takes a bead on who the voters voted for, and votes for same. But way back in 1824 and 1876, there wasn't a clear winner--in the first case because nobody got a majority, and in the second case because there was so much fraud in the South they sort of drew straws and chose Rutherford B. Hayes. The more things change, the more they don't. But the real kicker was in 1888, when one candidate got the most popular votes (votes from humans) but the other candidate got the most votes from the Electoral College. It was all perfectly legal, and not nearly as boring as I make it sound. In the year 2000, the presidency was won by the loser again (and what a loser this time). But this time it wasn't just an anomaly. The Supreme Court jiggered the election, the Electoral College's votes were skewed, and a guy named Hanging Chad declared George W. Bush the president.
This proved to be a terrible mistake, and to ensure such an arschficken never occurred again, lots of clever boots got together and decided to install digital voting machines in place of the old-fashioned steam-powered ones in common use throughout the country. But because America is currently in the grip of Capitalism as extreme as Communism was back in the good old days, we couldn't have a government agency take care of this. That might involve new bureaucracies and public spending, and besides launching the trifling $40,000,000,000 Homeland Security Department, this administration opposes that sort of thing.
So instead of 'open source' software to tabulate the votes as they are entered into the machines, private companies got to write private code for the purpose. ('Open source' software is any program whose code is publicly available, so that ordinary people may fail to understand it, not just computer experts). Now Australia has computerized voting, and the source code is readily available (it can be found at http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html, if you're that much of a geek). I've looked at it and it's so short and simple a monkey could understand it. My monkey has looked at it too, and he assures me this is the case. But the American code is not only secret, it's also 200,000 lines long, which makes it 'spaghetti code', so called because it's impossibly tangled and complex, or because it's made of pasta.
Not only is the American voting code secretly held by private companies (naturally for copyright reasons; the Dollar trumps Democracy every time), but private companies manufacture the voting machines. And those companies are owned, predominantly, by Republican interests. Including Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who won by a landslide on machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a company he owned a considerable interest in. And he wasn't the only one.
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