The public resistence to the belief in vote-hacking is enormous. It takes on virtually religious proportions. I've been active in this debate on /., and there are three classes of response:
1) Grow up! Vote hacking as always gone on. Real men don't cry when elections get stolen. And besides, you can hack paper votes too! (Presumably this is from people who have never used a computer to do a task quickly and easily that takes arduous hours manually.)
2) Don't be silly. It's impossible that "they" would ever let this happen.
3) Sure there have been a few hacks, but they don't really count because a) they were in favour of my party or b) they didn't change the outcome of the election or c) it would be just too painful to believe that our democracy has been stolen from us.
Now that it has become clear how easy it is to hack an election I've seen people claim that voting machine failures are probably due to people like me hacking elections to make a point. I believe it likely that the majority of Americans will refuse point-blank to believe that the American electoral process has been violated until they have repeated, flagrant examples of electoral failure.
So while I sympathize with your view that everyone's vote should always be counted, and I'm a little concerned that what I'm advocating has a flavour of "we had to destroy the democracy in order to save it" about it, I do not know of any other way to get past the religious belief people seem to have that "that just can't happen."
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Re: Not sure I get you
Date: 2006-11-01 11:18 pm (UTC)1) Grow up! Vote hacking as always gone on. Real men don't cry when elections get stolen. And besides, you can hack paper votes too! (Presumably this is from people who have never used a computer to do a task quickly and easily that takes arduous hours manually.)
2) Don't be silly. It's impossible that "they" would ever let this happen.
3) Sure there have been a few hacks, but they don't really count because a) they were in favour of my party or b) they didn't change the outcome of the election or c) it would be just too painful to believe that our democracy has been stolen from us.
Now that it has become clear how easy it is to hack an election I've seen people claim that voting machine failures are probably due to people like me hacking elections to make a point. I believe it likely that the majority of Americans will refuse point-blank to believe that the American electoral process has been violated until they have repeated, flagrant examples of electoral failure.
So while I sympathize with your view that everyone's vote should always be counted, and I'm a little concerned that what I'm advocating has a flavour of "we had to destroy the democracy in order to save it" about it, I do not know of any other way to get past the religious belief people seem to have that "that just can't happen."
If you have better ways, I'm all ears, though.