I Voted Dot Com?

by Nick Stone of the Drawnlines Blog

When James Carville came out with his book "40 More Years" about a near permanent Democratic majority, the nations scoffed. It was, after all, only back to 2004 that the Democratic Party was declared dead. And just back to 2006 saw their rise.

Voting trends are indeed historically cyclical. That being said, the upcoming storm may have less to do with the voters themselves and more to do with the way America votes. Could the Republicans really be in long-term trouble? Maybe so.

Fox reports on the rise of internet voting...

Long before the Internet, the two political parties routinely accused each other of vote fraud.

Democrats point to the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential election as a leading indicator of Republican malfeasance; they turned then-secretary of state Katherine Harris into a devil figure. And they hurled similar accusations against Republicans in Ohio in 2004, focused mostly on then-secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell. The mantric word for Democrats is “voter suppression”; it’s an article of faith among Democrats that Republicans, nearly half a century after the Voting Rights Act, are still figuring out ways to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning poor people and minorities.

For their part, Republicans point the finger right back at Democrats, and their left-wing allies, such as ACORN. The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund wrote a whole book on vote fraud, entitled bluntly, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, dwelling on the activities of ACORN in particular.

ACORN, along with law professors and the mainstream media, is at the spearhead of a broad coalition advocating full voting privileges for felons, the mentally incompetent, and those who come to the polls without any sort of valid identification.

And of course, the 2008 victory of Barack Obama, who rose from community organizer to the presidency, would seem to support the argument that Democrats gain the most from the full mobilization of those not otherwise well connected to society. Maybe that’s why almost all of the numerous allegations of vote fraud in 2008–in Missouri, California, Washington, and Nevada, just for starters–involved Democrats.

So if vote fraud is already a problem, what will happen when the “vote” is simply an electronic pulse, that could have come, potentially, from anywhere in the US–or around the world? Who will oversee the e-voting process? And who will oversee the overseers?

Posted by Nick Stone on 12:42 AM. Filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0