I've read a couple of articles this morning on "votergate," and they've gotten me to thinking. Even though I'm not particularly sad that Kerry got defeated--I'm of the mind that Bush made his bed and now he needs to lie in it, a la Nixon in 1972--I did get a little upset at the article in the Chronicle, "The Swift Rise and Fall of Votergate." (link: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2897192). This article basically states that despite attempts in the blogworld to make a story out of it, there's really nothing there. But from my reading, there's plenty. And the biggest issue, in my mind, is there's enough evidence to warrant a complete rejection of electronic voting as we now use it. We're choosing the leaders of the free world, dammit! This is important stuff.

There are far too many instances of machine instability and unreliability. My concern is not so much that the machines can be hacked, but that they are generally unreliable due to internal errors and software glitches. Computers are not problem free machines. They never will be. That's why there are hundreds of thousands people out there who get paid to fix them. So who's fixing the voting machines? It's like no one really cares that these are flawed machines.

Perhaps this election was not illicit, but that certainly doesn't mean that future ones won't be. Too many people out there pride themselves into thinking they can get away with things...