The Magic of America.
America is magic. An uncommon event in mankind’s woeful history of failed civilizations. But Americas magic may be coming to an end. Not that America will end, there’s too much money involved for the real estate that we call America to end. But the magic will end, and ironically it will end because of magic.
To believe that preamble you must be a purist. You must believe in the original intent of American Democracy. If you’re an anarchist, communist, socialist, or some other hybrid political entity, then this will fall on deaf ears. But, if you are a true believer in American Democracy it is painfully easy to envision the demise of America’s democratic magic.
Why? How? How soon? The why is easy. Amongst a long list of enemies to America, leading the list is ourselves. It truly is the old adage, “we have met the enemy and it is us“. However, in defense of us, we are involved in a war for survival that is unprecedented in our history. Never before have we faced so many evils from within. And never before have be been so poorly prepared to defend against such a pervasive enemy.
If nothing changes, all too soon the vote of each individual American will no longer be verifiable. That means that the process by which you cast your vote is one that cannot be backtracked. If left to become fully compliant with the provisions of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the purity of American Democracy will be something discussed as an abstraction in political science classes. Or worse, no longer discussed at all.
How this all came to be is in itself a prime example of how Americans have become so busy just trying to make ends meet that they have little time to watch who’s minding the store. The Help American Vote Act was a reflexive response to the election of 2000. While America was eating vast quantities of fast food and watching the Super Bowl, corporations and lobbyists were busy influencing the thinking of those people assigned the responsibility of developing a alternative system of voting than that system which screwed the 2000 election. You remember the “hanging chads” in Florida? The solution, said the lobbyists for the computer based elections systems manufacturers, is to make the possibility of hanging chads a moot point. Make the hanging chads go away by using computers.
Using computers makes it all sound so simple, so neat and easy, so leading edge. In reality, computers are another form of science based magic. Few computer users have any real appreciation of the magic of the logic cards that live within the computers brain, and have zero idea how the esoteric software makes it all work. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with magic. I like David Copperfield as much as the next guy, but like with all creations of mankind, magic can be used for good or for its opposite.
By accident or design, the magic of computer voting is working against the American democratic process. Voting into a computer requires that the voter endorse the concept of blind trust. Long ago, like day one, mankind realized that blind trust does not work. There must be a way to check the process of any system devised by man so that in balance all sides are receiving true intent information. If a system is designed to accommodate the purpose of true intent, a predictable result can be expected. However, if a system is poorly designed, or designed to deceive, then you have the voting crisis of 2008, also known as black box magic. Or, as like to call it, the Copperfield Effect.
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