Treason

You want to be a good citizen. You pay attention to politics. You listen to the candidates. You make your choices. You go to the polls. When you go to all the trouble of voting, you want your vote to matter. These days, though, it's entirely possible that your vote is irrelevant, that you wouldn't know about it, and that you have no way of finding out.

It doesn't matter which party you belong to. A bad election hurts everybody. If your side doesn't get hurt this time, it will next time. That's human nature.

We'd like to live in a democracy, where we can vote on every issue, but that's not practical. Instead we vote for representatives, and they vote on the issues. The brilliant idea behind a republic is that we have a controlled revolution every two years. We agree on the rules ahead of time, we put limits on the possible changes, and we abide by the results. If enough people play by the rules, it works--crudely, but it works.

What we have now is a loose confederation of people who routinely break the rules. We don't publicize them enough or punish them enough. They are trying, in a limited way, to overthrow our government by replacing a duly elected official with someone else. That is treason. We hang traitors.

These traitors are computers masquerading as voting machines. More specifically, these traitors are the people who make, sell, and operate the computers, because the computers themselves are pretty stupid. It turns out the people who make the computers are fairly stupid themselves. Smart people who know computers have been saying for years that these machines are vulnerable to manipulation, by the makers, by the users, and by hackers.

Here's a simple and common trick. A computer is pretty stupid; you have to spell out names for its codes, such as X for Smith and Y for Jones, so it will display the names. When you vote for Smith, the computer adds one to column X, and that's the only fact it records about your vote. Here's the trick. When they set up the computer for the election, they switch the codes: Smith becomes Y and Jones becomes X. Now, when you vote for Smith, your vote goes into column Y instead of column X.

Think about that very carefully. If you are a Republican, you may have just voted for a Democrat. There is no way to go back and check the numbers, to recount the ballots. On election night, the computer has a total in column X and a total in column Y, nothing else. If the traitor can switch the codes in the morning and switch them back at night, without being detected, it's the perfect crime.

It doesn't stop there. What if the computer changed every tenth vote from one column to another? What if it simply generated the totals without counting any votes? How would you know? The companies who make these computers won't let you see the code that runs them. Partisan politicians will protect their election officials. These computers aren't monsters like the Terminator, but they're dangerous just the same.

Here's the bottom line: whichever side you're on, it might be your vote that they change. If you didn't vote for them, then it's not really your government, it's someone else's, regardless of who you voted for. You're no longer living in a republic. Your government is no longer accountable to you. To those traitors and their masters, your vote doesn't matter, and you don't matter.

So what ya gonna do? Get an absentee ballot. If you go to vote, ask for a paper ballot. If they won't give you one, ask for a receipt from the machine (you won't get it). Don't make a stink so big that they have you arrested, but make a stink. And remember that the poll workers are volunteers. Don't blame them, blame the people who are buying our elections, and our candidates, and our government, and our souls.

After the election, tell your representatives that you demand they get rid of the computers. Do you have so much faith in computers, in the people who make and use them, that you are willing to give them absolute control over your vote? Do your trust your government that much?