Cynical Nation

As all of you know by now, I'm an opinionated bastard, and this site largely exists as a vehicle for me to spew my opinions in a forum that my wife will not be subjected to, thus saving my marriage.

As a general rule, however, I do not presume to tell people whom they should vote for, campaign for, give money to, or even which (if any) political causes they should support or oppose.

Why not? Because, as my friend Adam would put it, "I am full of shit." There's no reason on God's blue earth that anyone should listen to anything I say about anything.

But today I'm breaking with tradition a little. Frogsdong, one of my favorite lib'rul bloggers (and the blogger with the coolest name in my blogroll), asked me to join a blogswarm in support of House Bill 550 (more about which in due course, to use Buckley-ism.)

HR 550 comes to us from New Jersey's own Rush Holt. He's a politician I may not often find common cause with, but he is, like me, a former physicist, so we have that in common right off the bat (not only that, but his name is "Rush." Heh.) Although I could pick a few nits with the bill's wording, I think it's a good idea overall.

The plan, in short, is to mandate an auditable paper trail for electronic voting machines. As someone who has worked in the software world for more than a dozen years now, I agree with the EFF that this is a no-brainer. I know that crappy, buggy software is the rule rather than the exception in the PC-based world -- hell, I've written some of it.

I'm not one of these tin-foil-hat conspirists that believes elections are routinely "stolen" by Diebold, but I do believe there is considerable reason to question the reliability of the current generation of computerized balloting machines. Fraud is always a possibility, of course, but that's only part of the picture -- technical glitches, incompetence, and catastrophic system failures all most be considered as well.

Granted, nothing is easier to "hack" than a paper ballot. But for elections in which you have a digital database and a stack of paper ballots that must be reconciled, the opportunities for manipulation are much fewer than if you had only one or the other.

In short, I support this bill and the idea behind it. I agree with Frogsdong that this should be a bipartisan issue. If you agree as well, and if you're so inclined, you can click on the link below to sign Rush Holt's petition.

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HR 550,Votes,Elections,Verified
Voting,Rush Holt