Mark Crispin Miller

A response to Michael Scherer's "Taking the paper trail to Washington: The dangers of electronic voting machines got tallied Wednesday on Capitol Hill"

I hate to rain on anyone's parade, but this is not a good idea.

Why is our democracy at risk? Is it just because those DRE machines don't leave a paper trail? Or is it that the Bush Republicans detest democracy, since they cannot wield power without subverting the electoral system?

The fact is that they're pushing an agenda that could never win majority support in the United States--from liberals or conservatives. They've therefore had no choice but to commit election fraud, repeatedly and on a mammoth scale, deploying every trick and tactic in the book, and then some.

As I point out in Fooled Again, the Bush Republicans used paperless machines to cut the Democratic vote, not only in Ohio but from coast to coast--but they also cut the vote in states and counties that did not use paperless machines; and in those places that did use them, the Busheviks also relied on many other means of disenfranchising the majority.



They kept Americans from registering, tossed out or passed over countless ballots (including absentee ballots), wiped the names of (at least) tens of thousands from the voter rolls, carefully dispatched too few machines to Democratic precincts nationwide, used "challengers" to bully countless would-be voters into going home or staying home, mounted vast disinformation drives to mislead countless more, arranged a most fortuitous computer glitch so as to keep some two million expatriates from voting absentee, and otherwise transported this whole nation, white and black alike, back to the catastrophic epoch of Jim Crow.

The problem, then, is civic, not just technical, concerning the fanatical persistence of a full-scale movement deeply hostile to the letter and the spirit of our Constitution.

Now, we must ask ourselves: Would that movement be frustrated, its agenda thwarted, by the use of paper trails? Evidently not--since members of that very movement also back the Holt bill with enthusiasm. As the Salon piece points out, Mary Kiffmeyer, Minnesota's Secretary of State, has now testified in favor of the bill. It is more than relevant to note that Kiffmeyer is a stalwart Bushevik and theocratic maniac, who has publicly deplored the separation of church and state, and who did everything she could to slash the Democratic vote in Minnesota in the last election. (That appalling story is in Fooled Again, pp. 138-39.) Her record is so dismal that she's now in trouble, facing a strong challenge by Mark Ritchie, who knows full well what she has done to the electoral system in his state and means to change the situation. That such an operative as she--and David Cole, and John Groh of ES&S, and other Bushist agents--would support this measure tells us all we need to know about its usefulness.

We have heard it argued that the Holt bill is a half-step in the right direction, and that some reform is surely preferable to none at all. In this case that's a dangerous self-delusion. Sometimes "compromise" can only make things worse, as there really is no valid "middle way." So it is with torture, and illegal wars. Whatever "compromise" serves merely to protract such horrors is finally nothing but abetment, however well-intended it may be.

And so it is with the far-right crusade against American democracy. We must oppose that drive in every way we can--and that means not allowing its own managers to cast themselves as champions of electoral "reform."