#2 Our Sly Media

Our Sly Media

Knowing full well my feelings about electronic voting machines, someone brought back to me from Denver last week, clipped from the Rocky Mountain News of August 31^st 2007, an editorial titled “Paper nightmares”. I cite it in full for the clues may contain about why so many millions of otherwise sensible, hard-headed folks in the US have swallowed the commercial pitch that says we would all benefit from changing to electronics for voting. Oh, the demented dimwits! Bless their hearts!

In quoting this short editorial, mind you, I lay no claim to knowing who wrote it. Might have been the editor. Might have been one of the voting machine manufacturers. All I know is that this is what appeared in that paper at that time in the “Editorial & Opinion” section.

PAPER NIGHTMARES, what Colorado’s in for if state can’t certify election machines. [That’s the headline and sub-head. Sub-text: we need to approve these machines – if we don’t we’ll all suffer the torments of… wait for it… paper! I wonder whether a paper nightmare is anything like a paper tiger. In any case, for me the torments of paper would be far, far preferable to the torments of electronics. All those wires! The editorial continues.]

It’s almost unthinkable: a big, big election in Colorado and no electronic voting machines to record votes. In other words, picking a president, a U.S. senator, seven House members, and deciding who-knows-how-many other issues all with paper ballots. [Do you know, when I first read that I really did think they had their tongues in their cheeks? I actually thought I smelled irony. Silly me. They’re serious. They – whoever they are – seriously do regard it as unthinkable that an election should be decided with paper ballots. Did they ever wonder how the nation managed before Bill Gates? Probably not. The editorial continues.]

But that’s just what Colorado’s county clerks – and voters – might have to do in 2008 if the state can’t recertify the machines its counties rely on to quickly and accurately reflect the will of the people. [Funny way to put it. If you asked me, I’d rather have my will reflected by what I myself marked on a paper ballot than by a combination of monitor screen, key pad, software and electricity. But the two big words in that sentence are ‘quickly’ and ‘accurately’. After all those hours of voters waiting in line in Ohio they’re talking speed? After all those thousands and thousand of ‘lost’ or ‘flipped’ votes in Florida, they’re talking accuracy? These people will say anything! The editorial continues.]

And you thought our last election was a mess! [Yes, I did.]

The problem, it seems, lies with the four vendors who supply electronic voting machines in Colorado – Premier Election Solutions, Hart InterCivic, ES&S and Sequoia, although at least two of them deny that they’ve been foot-dragging. [No, the problem lies with those who influenced the good people of Colorado to believe that voting had anything to do with private enterprise. The editorial continues.]

Under the terms of a 2006 court order, the Colorado secretary of state is required to retest and recertify voting equipment before the next primary, general or statewide ballot election. The biggest test will of course come in November 2008 when Coloradans will select successors to President Bush and Sen. Wayne Allard, as well as elect a new representative in the 2^nd Congressional District (where Mark Udall is moving on to run for the Senate), just to mention three of numerous important races. [I guess retesting and recertifying would make him feel more important than would having to sharpen all those pencils. The editorial continues.]

After rules to assure the security of voting equipment were finally put in writing in March, the vendors were told to submit equipment for testing. Secretary of Sate Mike Coffman originally anticipated that the testing and recertification process could be completed by July 1. [The pencils could all be sharpened that afternoon.]

But the vendors balked, according to Coffman, who insists that “they have been slow to cooperate in getting us the documentation, hardware and other necessary information that we have requested.” [Too busy elsewhere?]

Finally, on Wednesday, Coffman issued an ultimatum to the vendors: Fully comply by Nov. 16 or their machines won’t be certified for use in the 2008 general election.

If all four vendors fail to meet the deadline, and assuming Coffman is serious, that would put Colorado’s county clerks in quite a bind. [You mean they’d have to ‘force’ people to vote they way they always have? I’ve been in worse binds than that.]

Coffman suggests that certified optical scanners used by the clerks to record absentee and mail-in ballots might be pressed into service. [Assuming he’s serious?] Alternatively, they might be able to lease other certified electronic equipment, though in a national presidential election, availability would very much be a question.

But neither option seems likely to be adequate, at which point a paper ballot might become inevitable. [That’s one way to put it. I’d prefer ‘possible’.] In that case, Coffman says, his office “will be fully engaged in assisting affected counties [or lucky counties] to find solutions.”

Now there’s optimism for you. But we’re betting Premier Election Solutions, Hart InterCivic, ES&S and Sequioa [sic] will all ante up. If they didn’t know Colorado considered them late to the party [I thought you said it was a poker game], they certainly know now. And which of them, after all, would want to be the odd company out, a cloud of doubt lingering over its nationwide (and even worldwide) business? [Yeah, there’s good money to be made in this voting game, or party, whatever it is. Forget democracy. But the editorial continues.]

And why should they be worried? Certainly the state will protect their proprietary interests. [Whose proprietary interests are more important, folks? Those of these four business enterprises, or those of the people? Hey, we’re casting democratic votes here, not bidding on some sordid contract. The editorial ends.]

Unless, of course, they fear their machines won’t pass muster. In that case, we can understand how they might prefer a degree of awkward suspicion over damning certainty.

That’s it. It ends on a threat, the ultimate threat in the game as it’s played these days: do your deals by our rules or we won’t let you dip your hands in the public pocket. Same rules for elections as for Iraq. Fair’s fair. In Denver or in Washington.

#1 Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Moved to start blogging by the extraordinary piece called "Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph And The Hard Year Ahead" by Chris Floyd, I'm creating Scott's Shot as my medium.

To shove the thing out to sea, let me start by posting a paragraph from an account I wrote last week of an August family reunion near Myrtle Beach, S.C. Here's what I said,

That particular stretch of US 17 (business) near Myrtle Beach has become bizarre to a European eye. The four-lane road, with a grass divider, must be over a hundred yards wide. It is bordered for miles and miles in the style of an extended amusement park with malls, giant advertising signs enormous models of dinosaurs and other animals, bars, fireworks shops, drug stores, water parks, restaurants, souvenir shops, mini golf courses, driving ranges, batting nets, banks, filling stations, and scores more enterprises, many exhibiting architectural eccentricities that would make San Francisco seem dowdy. The sole industries locally are services and fishing, and the fishing is fading away. The existence of schools proves that there are year-round residents. When questioned, natives told us that everyone services the tourists in one way or another, even in winter. Evidently there is as great a concentration of golf courses in Myrtle Beach and district as there is anywhere. The speed limit varies between 45 and 35 mph, and is obeyed by the huge vehicles, trucks, Hummers, SUVs, ordinary cars and motorcyclists. These last seemed quite numerous, often guided by gray-bearded middle-aged men, most of whom are, contrary to expectation, according to John Groves, pussy-cats. The highest speed limit I saw in the state was 55 mph. Local people complain of gas prices, but to a European they seem not high at all.

To my eye that part of the world is, or was, essentially beautiful. The beach and the ocean are the overriding constant, the temperature of the latter when we were there hovering around 30° centigrade. My swimming pool rarely reaches that level of warmth. The land is naturally flat, sandy, thickly covered with trees and populated, like the waters, by a teeming variety of wildlife. Dappled sunlight on parks dotted with live oaks hung with Spanish moss are a personal favourite among the characteristic sights to be enjoyed there.

However… it does seem to me that since the mid twentieth century or so just about wherever humans have touched this landscape they have blighted it. Made newly mobile in the first place by the coming of the automobile, and then made capable of taming the formerly inescapably punishing heat and humidity with the arrival of air conditioning, the mushrooming human population, despite wars and diseases and natural disasters, has descended upon the low country in quite an historically short space of time and has done so in an economic atmosphere where the commercial profit motive alone was more and more the sole determiner of people’s behaviour. The result has been colossal pollution of various kinds, a kind of mass rape, really: entire landscapes of huge advertising signs, acres and acres of lovely land paved over for parking lots, over-fishing, the spewing of enormous quantities of oil fumes into the sea and air, mindless consumption on an unsustainable scale of electricity, fuel oil and other natural resources. In my own mind, behind deep distaste for all this, lay a nagging worry for the ghastly example being shown to young visitors and natives of this kind of corruption as a proper way to live, the lesson given them that it was not just all right but positively desirable to conduct oneself in this way. It makes me genuinely fearful for the force of the shock, when it comes, of their being compelled before long to accept that it will all have to stop. Will people be able to handle it, not just in the Carolina low country but in the nation as a whole?

On the other hand, as I often say of my commune of Courniou here in France, the secret is the people, the friendliness, the openness their interest in others. That’s something you don’t find everywhere, and to my mind it’s priceless. Like the perfect stranger lady – I’d say ‘woman’ in most other contexts - in Georgetown, as we walked back to the car with a bunch flowers to take to Miss Minnie Kennedy, who impetuously crossed the sidewalk over to Barbara and me and out of the blue, exclaimed over how lovely the flowers were and wished us a ‘nice day’.