Gore Vidal Savages Electronic Voting 1029
gribbly writes "aging author and social critic Gore Vidal savaged electronic voting in an interview with the LA Weekly. The interview deals mainly with (what's wrong with) the Bush Administration, but halfway down he says: 'We don't want an election without a paper trail...all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?'."
Demand a paper trail! (Score:5, Informative)
Must be Bush's fault (Score:2, Informative)
And if Clinton was president odds are they would be donating to Clinton. It may be corruption, but at least it's universal.
Re:The problem with electronic voting (Score:2, Informative)
A one-time pad isn't what you seem to think of. For example, I could have a cd-rw with a 100,000 1,024kbyte keys, all different. You have the same cd-rw. I send you a message encrypted with one of the keys - then I overwrite that key w. the burner. You decrypt w. the same key, and overwrite the key w. the burner. So long as we are the only 2 people w. the physical CD-RW, the "one-time" pad is good for 100,000 messages.
Re:I hardly believe (Score:2, Informative)
Re:enough (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gore Vidal is an idiot (Score:2, Informative)
Odd that so many times Bush's relatives are dragged out to make some sort of wacky conspiracy theory, but Gore Vidal talks about elections and everybody forgets that he is Albert Gore Jr.'s cousin!
I would be quite surprised if the blanket statement about contributions to "the Bush Administration" (sorry, in the USA we contribute to campaigns, not administrations) ommitted contributions to the DNC, the loosing campaign of Al Gore, and current Democrat candidates. Just a hunch, since large firms usually contribute to both sides.
Re:Corruption? (Score:1, Informative)
tr.v. savaged, savaging, savages
1. To assault ferociously.
2. To attack without restraint or pity: The critics savaged the new play.
Re:Corruption? (Score:5, Informative)
From m-w.com:
savage v.
ravage v.
Seems like either of these is just fine in the context provided.
Educate yourself before you dismiss that (Score:5, Informative)
Wally O'Dell has sworn to deliver Ohio's electoral votes for G.W. next year. That's well beyond the level of the generality you've just expressed.
And no, companies and industries don't give money equally. In some industries they do, in some there's a much more slanted bias. Think the energy industry's giving money to Howard Dean much? Trial lawyers give money to Democrats. HMOs give money to Republicans. For some mysterious reason, there's a very real Republican slant among these vote-counting companies. We're not talking about them covering their bases both ways, we're talking about openly advocating for one party while selling machines that count votes.
Re:How much press will it get, though? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:sure, but... (Score:3, Informative)
A quick google search pulled up this: [This year]"at least 39 states have considered more than 100 bills that affect immigrants' access to driver's licenses." Some of them moved in favor of granting licenses, while others were against it. The controversy lies in what a drivers license means. As codified in law, many states just use it as permission to use the road. It just happens that so many groups also use them as identification cards or proof of nationality, which is a bad thing.
It seems you are a little late in your discovery.
Re:Who cares about paper trails? (Score:2, Informative)
Look here [infoplease.com] for a complete recap of the recount. It was Gore requesting recounts in democratic counties, not vice-versa.
From the site: Thursday, Nov. 9--Gore's camp requests a hand recount of the approximately 1.8 million ballots cast in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Volusia counties, Democratic strongholds
EFF action alert on this. (Score:5, Informative)
What's a few minutes of your time for democracy?
Re:How much press will it get, though? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Ugggg.... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes you will never find any company unbiased but we need a trial and the database should be public. Hell, the code should be owned the states and government!
People who count votes usually have both a republican and a democrat together looking over question ballets to decide. We need this as well.
Who does count the votes anyway? Diebold??
Re:How much press will it get, though? (Score:2, Informative)
They put on a show, replacing Phil's, that presented some psycho right winger who eventually told a gay caller to get AIDS and die. Savage, I think his name was. His show now has zero ratings, becaue they canned his hate-filled ass. But since they knew who he was when they hired him, they obviously wanted him to say such things.
There aren't any "liberal" (read: people who do not regularly profess hard-right viewpoints as facts) talk shows on television, none, that I can see. The few reporters who are old enough and smart enough to understand what is going on are too afraid of losing their jobs and their standing if they even utter a peep about the bias. Read about that CNN reporter who said CNN toed the Bush line hard to placate the Fox viewship; she got spanked hard. Fox went wild smearing her, proving her point. Rather said in a Euorpean interview that reporters are no longer permitted to tell the truth anymore, and that he would be "necklaced" (read South African history for a reference) if he said anything the hardrighters didn't like.
You DON'T GET AIRED if you contradict the right-wing for very long.
Re:Well said Mr. Vidal. (Score:3, Informative)
While I don't want to put words in the mouth of the guy you're actually replying to, Bush didn't win the popular vote no matter how things are recounted--he won the electoral vote. And, the question of whether the way the election was actually decided was appropriate is a separate question from the vote count. Bush was, in effect, selected by the Supreme Court. Yes, you're right that subsequent investigation showed that Bush would have won the electoral vote regardless; that doesn't make me more comfortable with the way the election was resolved, because "it wouldn't have mattered anyway" isn't a sufficient rebuttal to a charge of not counting everyone's vote in a democracy.
There's a separate question that came up a lot as to whether the electoral college should even be used, a question which is bound to come up in the rare cases like this when it seems to "thwart" the will of the people. Of course, setting aside the questions revolving around the subsequent legal case, the electoral college did exactly what it was supposed to--its point is to keep rural, sparsely populated states from having their votes overwhelmed by major population centers. (Whether it ultimately serves or hinders democracy to effectively give each resident of, say, North Dakota a greater proportional weight than each resident of New York is another question.)
Re:Well said Mr. Vidal. (Score:4, Informative)
If you count every ballot on which a candidate preference could be determined, including ballots in which a voter punched the chad and then wrote in the name of that same candidate, Al Gore wins Florida by 107 votes.
Re:How much press will it get, though? (Score:3, Informative)
The article was written in the mid 1990's, not last week. This is an important distinction to make, as your post implies that Bush the Elder disapproves of the actons of Bush the Younger.
But your major point about Time magazine yanking their archived article off the Internet is valid and significant. Unless it was part of a routine culling of articles off their online archives in order to preserve their resources, it is certainly a great wrong to pull this, or any other article, away from free public access.
Re:Left vs. Right (Score:1, Informative)
B) Producing endless propaganda about WMD and 'imminent threats' that would do the soviets proud, as a pretext to send hundreds of young men and women to die in a country you and your pals covet.
Slight difference in severity, it seems to me, but then I could be biased. That you can equate Clinton's sins with Bush's and keep a straight face suggests that you are too. Heavily.