But, after Obama prevailed in 2008, those concerns were quickly forgotten by many Democratic-leaning voters. Progressives, like Bernie Sanders, raised public consciousness over issues pertaining to wealth inequality and the oligarchic impact of the ability of the top one percent to control our elections and our public discourse. Yet, even the Sanders campaign failed to address the lack of accountability posed by e-voting--this, even as his campaign consistently performed better in caucuses where the votes were, for the most part, not electronically tabulated.
Unlike voter suppression, election integrity is not a partisan issue. Thus, we find some leading Democrats, for political reasons, advancing some of the worst in e-voting proposals. For example, California's Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla has advocated the "most" insecure system, Internet voting.
From a political standpoint, it's an attractive proposal. Democrats fare better when turnout is maximized. The easier it is for citizens to participate, the greater the likely turnout.
That all sounds fine so long as you don't give a damn whether or not your vote is electronically flipped to someone you actually oppose.
Faced with indifference or even outright derision from both politicians and a corporate-owned mainstream media that controls 90% of what the voting public sees and hears on radio and television, computer scientists and election integrity advocates find themselves in a circumstance akin to the question of whether a tree that falls inside a forest actually makes a sound when there is no one close enough to hear it crash to the ground.
But, there is a prospect for breaking through the corporate media's electronic curtain on this issue. As I pointed out over at Veterans for Bernie in "Media and the New Generation Gap," there is a technological explanation that helps to explain why the Sanders campaign performed far better amongst younger voters than older voters--this despite the fact that polls that focus solely on issues as opposed to candidate identity revealed overwhelming support for Sanders's positions on specific issues like single-payer healthcare.
According to the Pew Research Center, "89% of those 65 and older get most of their election news from television." By contrast, a growing number of Internet savvy millennial voters access alternative, interactive and foreign media on their computers. So there's the prospect that if election integrity advocates continue to hammer away, a younger, more sophisticated audience may come to realize that genuine democracy cannot be achieved until we ensure a transparent system in which all votes lawfully cast are accurately counted.
JB: Thanks for pointing out that silver lining, Ernie. We do very poorly when compared with other countries. A 2014 study conducted by Harvard's Kennedy School ranked us 26th in the world. The article I read reported "On the overall ranking, the United States finished just below Micronesia and just ahead of Mexico." Definitely nothing to write home about. Your thoughts on this and anything else you'd like to add before we wrap this up?
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