JammerBlog

I have been sort-of following with a certain fascination the sites that keep up the myth of the stolen election. They point to this statistical study, or that one, or point to a conspiracy theory that at bottom says that, having gotten these computer programmers to write code to steal votes, the nefarious plotters are now refusing to pay.

The sites trying to take a higher tone suggest they just want people to know their vote was counted correctly, and piously state that with 20% of the voters thinking the election wasn't legitimate, Something Must Be Done. Of course, how many of that 20% spend their time reading alarmist websites?

Of course, there were mistakes, foul-ups and even actual skullduggery in the 2004 elections. With 120 million people voting in thousands of locations using dozens of systems, how could there not be? And anyone who works to fix those problems and run in people who actually have done such things deserves help and praise.

But lets face facts. Most of these people pimping this stuff right aren't motivated by non-partisan good government impulses. Its more than a little ironic that they claim to be trying to strengthen the democratic process when in fact they are busy scaring the daylights out of people who need little excuse to scare in the first place. To paraphrase another famous ironic line: Is it necessary to destroy people's faith in the vote in order to save it?