Glitches are BAIT, Whether Intended to Be or Not Is Irrelevant

[Land Shark]

Mark these words: The Glitches will get Solved. Mostly.

What will be left are the unseen and undetectable glitches and fraud within the software, all wrapped sweetly in the appearance of a smooth election, with handshakes all around between vendors and elections officials, and pre-prepared press releases all going out on time with the magic numbers inserted.

If this industry was bold and visionary enough to come up with HAVA, a thing so radical that most activists are left suggesting helpful modifications of the basic idea, fearful (and with some good reason) that anything more appropriate wouldn't be "realistic". Victory to the visionary, at least for now.

So Thomas Friedman's article in today's or yesterday's NYT is most instructive: If you control the name (or the frame) you control the result. Friedman used the example of how big oil defines alternative energy as a frivolous unrealistic nice try, so that it is never seen as a necessary responsible matter of eventual survival economically and perhaps physically.

I doubt these machines are really this bad for this long through sheer negligence. It smells more like BAIT to me. BAIT for activists to invest all their eggs in the anti-glitch basket, so that the companies can then solve their software problems and pronounce victory, with the new electronic age of reliability fully at hand. They most certainly WILL do so, at the very first semi-credible opportunity.

But then the vendors will have what they really want: a fat contract that can never be allowed to fail (so the government must bail) and a product with built in lack of accountability through secret vote counting software.

Plus, the power to select any politician they want. Even if they never used this power, all politicians had best err on the side of caution and not cross these corporations, cause who knows?? But then, we have it straight from Diebold that Sequoia's parent got into elections for the express purpose of election fraud. http://legistar.county.allegheny.pa.us/attachments/3868.htm Takes one to know one?

It seems to me that these glitches are, in effect, bait. They'll be solved, and they'll function as bait regardless of whether they are intended to be such. Why? Because it's highly likely that beta test elections will improve reliability over time, wiping out the activist investment in anti-glitch information, and creating the illusion of progress. And progress is the very illusion that got them started in the first place. As if it's "progress" to eliminate most of the checks and balances in our elections, and hide the counting of the vote from the Public it is supposed to serve.