Guest Blogged by Warren Stewart of VoteTrustUSA.org and cross-posted here.
“A perception of legitimacy is more important than legitimacy itself.”— from the movie “Man of the Year”.
Unless you’ve spent the last week on a secluded desert island, you’ve probably caught some of the Hollywood pre-release hype about “Man of the Year”, which will hit theatres nationwide on October 13. The premise of the movie is that a comedian, Tom Dobbs (played by Robin Williams), who has made a career of skewering politicians, runs a Pat Paulsen-style campaign for president. Sure enough, he wins.
Or does he?
It turns out that his election was the result of a computer voting error. “Delacroy Voting Systems” has sold the nation on their new electronic voting system and one of their employees discovers that the system has a ‘glitch’ that gave the election to the clown. The company, who couldn’t care less who wins the election and is only concerned about the effect the revelation might have on the company’s stock, plots to destroy the employee’s credibility.
It all sounds chillingly familiar, doesn’t it?…
The movie is fiction but the potential that election results could be manipulated by insiders with access to computerized voting or affected by software errors is reality. Ballot programming errors affected the results in nine races in a Republican primary election in Iowa last June. Primary elections have been questioned in Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, and numerous other states across the country based on machine malfunctions and irregularities in vote tabulation. In many of these cases, like the one in Iowa, it was possible to recover the will of the voters because there was an independent means of verifying the accuracy of the electronic tallies through paper ballots. In others, there was no such safety net.
No doubt, the voting industry’s talking points will show up indirectly in the words of reviewers and talking heads, who will point out how such a scenario is pure fiction and could never happen. We will be assured that real life voting systems are rigorously tested to stringent standards, even though those standards have been written with the vendors interests in mind and what passes as “testing” is paid for by the vendors and hidden from any public oversight. And of course that testing has resulted in the certification and implementation of the very systems that have been demonstrated to have severe security vulnerabilities and proven to be unreliable and prone to malfunction in actual elections. As in the movie, the credibility of those who question the merit of casting and counting votes on electronic voting machines in the real world – a “scary minority” as described in a recent Congressional hearing – will continue to be challenged.
Hopefully, this blockbuster film will raise general awareness of the grave threat that trusting secret software to count votes is a fundamental threat to our democracy and that “scary majority” will demand the use of transparent, verifiable voting systems – before life imitates art.
Mr. Stewart concludes this post: “Hopefully, this blockbuster film will raise general awareness of the grave threat that trusting secret software to count votes is a fundamental threat to our democracy and that “scary majority” will demand the use of transparent, verifiable voting systems – before life imitates art. Unfortunately, I strongly believe that it is art imitating life in this instance.
After rereading the title of this post, “Man of the Year: Art Imitates Life”, I guess Mr. Stewart (or whoever titled this post) sees it the same way I suggested in comment #1.
Yes, I knew this was about electronic voting machines. Robin Williams was on Bill Maher, talking about it.
On my local radio station, the local conservative talk show host said that e-vote machines are easy to use.
Ummm…that’s not the point…”ease of use”…the point is that they are proven beyond a doubt to be easily hacked into without a trace!!!
This is a pleasant surprise & must see 4 me . . .
Robin Williams is socially responsible person & is in 1 of my all time favorite films !
I applaud the entertainment industry for trying to put these messages out where we can reach some folks we simply can’t with just straight news stories. It’s movies like this, “V for Vendetta”, the opening episodes of this season of Battlestar Galactica (which is a complete metaphor for the Iraq occupation), “The Death of a President” which pushes out the idea of what might happen if we were to have an assassination now, amongst others that are trying to break through the “entertainment” wall. More power to them!
I wonder if any of the game developers out there are progressive enough that have thought about trying to put an all out effort to put a video game out there in this category of “agitprop” that could attract attention of the gaming community, which probably tunes itself out to what’s going on in the political world even moreso than the TV and film crowds do. I guess I’ve seen one that kind of is like that “Shattered Union” (about a newer civil war here in the U.S.), but nothing that really takes on the problems that we’re facing directly. It would seem a video game on how to program an election fraud and/or how to stop it (as perhaps a two player game) would be an ideal thing to get younger folks starting to think about this issue too.
Hear! Hear! Calipendence #5!
I think that’s a great idea. A game that would see who could out-hack whom to win the government!
Anybody know anybody in computer games?
shw
Is this turns out to be a huge money maker, it will be very fun to watch the Diebold reps go crazy. Come on guys, it’s not worth what they’re paying you! You better put on your Groucho Marx glasses before any press conference.
Big Dan #3… What a ringing endorsement! Hey, rat poison is easy to use! And guns are, too! And cocaine! And nuclear bombs!
What’s sad is that many listeners will be convinced by his logic.
Never got from the trailers that there was “computer glitches” involved.. Now I might actually have a movie I see in the theaters this year instead of waiting for the DVD release 😀
It’s a sad state of affairs when “liberal Hollywood” has to “enlighten” people as to the “real world dangers” out there. And then the right-wing-nut-jobs come screaming about how it’s destructive to “our country” [the one where only rich white folks matter] or try to say “it’s only a movie! you must be nuts to believe any of that!”.. kind of like when the Trollsâ„¢ were spewing about The Daily Show being “a comedy show” and having no “merit in reality”.. yet, now we see reports of how it’s a lot like “a news show”, and reports on “real happenings”.
DEATH TO SMOOCHY!..
Is it a shock to learn that the computerized voting is flawed and error ridden? In a day when it almost seems weekly we get virus and exploit warnings and people hacking ATM machines is it any wonder that virtual voting also is taking the hit on this. There does indeed need to be a way to get independent verification of the data. But then again, it’s more than the voting itself that is flawed, but rather who also gets to vote and how many times they get to vote etc.