Anonymous is "curious to know why I don't hear more from conservatives over the need for ensuring accuracy and transparency of new technology voting processes. Aren't accurate vote counts fundamental to a democracy and in every American's interest?"
Good question--to which there is only a less than satsfactory answer: Conservatives are loath to boss around local governments and insist on some uniform technological standard when there's no clear need for one. Miscounts can be corrected, recounts required by legislativea action, and so on.
Also, the only way of guranteeing a perfectly accurate count everywhere is to insist every locality use the same perfect machine. But for one thing, perfect machines don't exist.
Anything less than a perfect vote count may be, technically, a violation of the democratic principle, but only in the rarified realm of abstraction, where the perfect need not bother with reality and human fallibility.
In reality, nowhere is democracy in better shape than here in the United States. We are long past the time when ballot-box stuffing, dead-men voting, vote purchasing, and actual vote suppression were all practically routine and resulted in distortion much, much greater than the glitch-type problems we see today.
15 minutes ago
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The problem with working together on election reform is the demagoguery of Democrats on the subject.
The motivating impetus of so many participants from the Left in reform initiatives is preventing "another Florida", or forstalling "Republican suppression of the Black vote". And their eyes glaze over when fingers point toward Democrats, who effectively control the voting procedures in so many of the locales at "ground zero" of this crazy rhetoric.
How can those of us focused on substantive issues work with these folks?
How can anyone bear to listen to Democrats complain about the "rush to electronic voting", which was brought about entirely, of course, by their rhetorical extremes after 2000?
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