Finally, late last week I was alerted to an unscientific poll on the website of the Columbus Dispatch. It does not reveal how many people have voted, and the percentage numbers haven't been updated in a long time, yet my Ohio friends in the J30 Coalition tell me the Dispatch has not yet published anything about the results. The question:
"Do you trust election results from electronic voting machines after the accuracy of some was questioned by an independent study?"
Yes: 23% No: 77%
The site accepts comments but announces it will screen them and post selectively. My comment appears here (time stamp 8/17 4:00pm):
Trust is irrelevant. Democracy needs checks and balances. I oppose electronic voting because there is no basis for confidence in the results. Currently, voting machines with secret ("proprietary") programming code leave no way to verify that results match the will of the people. We are forced to trust, like it or not. The outcomes of elections are based on these corporate secrets rather than the Consent of the Governed. It is from this Consent, according to the Declaration of Independence, that government derives "just Power." The backlash is a challenge to the legitimacy of our current so-called leaders. Our message: We Do Not Consent.
There are a lot of comments worth reading and it is heartening to see how many people really get it. It should not surprise us to see that we are a vast majority, though these clear signs are far too infrequent. It helps to be reminded.
