Clicking for Freedom

It doesn’t take Nostradamus or even the winner of your office football pool (or maybe even the loser) to forecast what’s going to happen on Election Day and thereafter. The Orange Menace will claim victory somehow and allege that any votes contradicting his claim were fraudulent.  We will watch for weeks as courtrooms around the country are flooded with lawsuits over ballots and totals; questions will be raised about who gets to choose Electors; the Republican stacked Supreme Court (and I don’t mean “stacked” because of Amy Comey Barret in that way) will decide in their Leader’s favor. In the end, if there ever is one, our election system will never be the same.

Not a pretty picture. What can we do about it?  Not much now.  In the future? How about computer voting?

That’s right.  Why don’t we vote in the same way we now do almost everything else.  We shop. We get our news. We communicate with each other. When was the last time you actually sent someone a letter, I mean a real letter, and put it in the mail?.  If you’re anything like me (which, in many ways, I don’t wish on you) it was many moons ago.  Yet, our big voting innovation this year is vote by how? Vote by Mail, for God’s sake. Now, Trump has pounded away at this system claiming that it will lead to endemic fraud. On the one hand, if anyone knows about fraud, it’s the founder of Trump University.  However, in those times when our President isn’t being fraudulent, he’s just plain lying.  In this case, he’s just lying.  All experts agree that mail-in ballots are safe and efficient.

However, mail-in-ballots also take a lot more time to tabulate.  That is going to be the issue this year.  The delay will give the Liar-in-Chief the opportunity to trigger all the chaos projected in the first paragraph of this blog.

So, why not abandon mail for voting the same way we have abandoned mail for everything else?  The main objection is that computers can be hacked. Hacked votes could then be distorted. Let’s examine that.

If computer communications are so easy to hack, why do we do a whole lot of very sensitive things that way now?  For example, we pay our bills.  That requires a pretty safe system.  Beyond that, all banks daily send billions of dollars back and forth electronically to allow for commerce throughout the world. That requires a pretty safe system. Hell, we conduct war over the internet.  Drone operators sit in front of their computer screens in Nevada and direct bombing runs in Asia. And the topper – the “nuclear football” – the thing that follows the President everywhere and initiates planetary destruction – is controlled by a system called, “Milstar”. Milstar consists of five satellites for world-wide communications that our government tells us are “jam-resistant.” So, nuclear war can be done by computer, but, voting can’t be? Let’s use Milstar for voting.

Is there a possibility that hacking might occur? Sure.  But, that possibility exists with all of the computer transactions we engage in. Yet, here we are, continuing to rely on those transactions and very successfully.

In fact, there is now a federal law that allows states to adopt computer voting. It is called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. As the name implies, it is limited to the votes of military and citizens abroad. Twenty-three states have adopted it. All of them allow voting by email. Five of them (Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, North Dakota, and West Virginia) allow it by web portal. One of those states (I forget which) allows it only if the voters are in a war zone. IN A FUCKING WAR ZONE??? Apparently, computer votes are perfectly safe while the enemy is trying to kill you but unsafe if cast from your kitchen.

Maybe we should consider the United States today as a war zone. Actually, we’re getting closer to that all the time.