When W was first "elected", I commented to a co-worker that I thought it might well be the last election ever held in the US.
These days, the mandatory transition to no-paper-trail Electronic Voting Machines seems to be the way my dire prediction could wind up being fulfilled all the while retaining the appearance that elections actually are being held and just happen to be turning out in favor of those who would have chosen to abolish the elections.
There is, however, so far, still a way to stand in the way of any fraudulent electronic takeover:
VOTE VIA ABSENTEE BALLOT, and photocopy the ballot you mail in, and have everybody you know do the same.
If enough people are known to be doing this, it would provide an approach to actually verifying that the absentee ballots counted are the ones actually cast. And theoretically, if the volume of those absentee ballots grew significant enough, a major discrepancy between the machine voting-profiles and the absentee ballot voting-profiles would draw attention that could drive even more voters to choose to vote absentee.
Those physical-paper absentee ballots, or whatever records of those need to be kept by law, especially when they represented a majority of the actual voting, could not be so casually destroyed and disavowed. Even the most callous anti-democratic Fascist might be deterred by a fear of mass hangings that might be engendered by the memory of how the country was supposed to be running.
Though we now have at least one Supreme Court Justice who proudly disavows the concept of "one man, one vote", it seems like everyday people will likely remember that phrase from their early schooling. It is something closely enough akin to the basic definition of the word "democracy" that a thing like "government by the people" might be remembered as an important idea, and that their one vote is not just something abstract enough to be consigned to the bowels of somebody else's computer.
So, VOTE VIA ABSENTEE BALLOT and photocopy it, and make it known that you think this is a good idea.
Lenny Gray was, at one time, a Conservative Libertarian who eventually noticed the "well let them die" attitude that served his Right Wing compatriots as the common answer to the complex problems of the life of communities. He now considers himself a Leftist, where "Left" denotes the interests of the "common man". He's a computer programmer by trade.
