Voting Republican?

If you're one of the dwindling number of people planning to "stay the course" with the Republican party, a man named James Richard Brett has some words for you, including these ones:

"Figure it out America. You have one weekend to make one of the most important choices of your life. Are you going to support the reckless status quo, or are you going to choose a new team to pull us through the next years?"

The rest of it is here. And I say well said, Mr. Brett.

The rest of the world is hoping that the madness has passed, and the Democrats--or independants--will take control of Congress and the Senate. I've given up on holding my breath after the last election, but I'm crossing my fingers.

I confess though, that I feel there's clearly no hope for any district in which voting machines are used. There is, I suppose, a good reason to name them "voting machines" rather than "vote-counting machines". A thing's name should describe what it does, after all.

Wanna know why I have no hope for black-box voting? We could start with the Princeton study:

"We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces."

Or the minibar key story:

"The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

[...]

Update (Oct. 28): Several people have asked whether this entry is a joke. Unfortunately, it is not a joke.

How about the "flip-of-a-swith" problem? (via BoingBoing):

If you want to steal an election, use a Diebold machine.

Here's a cascade of other concerns raised, from a Google search at BoingBoing.

The head of the Diebold company is on record as having comitted to "deliver votes to the president", meaning Dubya.

But maybe they'll have fixed the problem and will be printing a paper record? Doubt it. After all, the articles above detailing the multifarious flaws in black-box voting aren't raising any new concerns.

The good news is that on the strength of the current polls, a GOP victory will look decidedly bad, and smell worse. The least suspicious thing Diebold or its friends can do, it seems to me, is lose by a smaller margin.