Wisconsin And Tocqueville

You know, the way I always expect the worst of people and politicians (both of them, people AND politicians) you'd think that I would be used to being pleasantly surprised by the way things tend to turn out better than I had anticipated, but you'd be wrong because I am sadly correct far too often for my taste, so it was great to see that voters in Wisconsin actually voted in their own self interest rather than in the interest of their putative public servants who see themselves as a down-trodden ruling class. How's that for a bizarre self-concept? down-trodden rulers? Anyway, now that the stock market has expressed the economy's collective relief at the turning back of the thuggery, kleptocracy, and union-bossery I thought it was time to drag out that great quote from Alexis de Tocqueville that everyone knows, but that no one seems to believe anymore:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

I think that the vote in Wisconsin may actually have put a glimmer of hope in these jaded eyes of mine - not that I'm going to be looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or anything like that, but it may be that the voters there finally figured out whose largesse was being voted to whom and they realized that we're on the verge of running out of "them" as in "tax them to pay for whatever it is that I want for myself" and so it's time for people to start paying their own way rather than soaking the tax-target group du jour (take that, de Tocqueville!).

Sorry to sound a note of hope. I'll try not to make it a habit.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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Won't Someone Think of the Voters!?

Good grief. 
First we have elected officials actually proposing that we suspend elections so we can "get something done" in Washington.
Now we have evidence that the voting machines that we may (or may not?) be using next November are susceptible to some of the easiest hacking we've ever seen.

Isn't it obvious that having a voting system where there's no way to check the results other than to read the same numbers again is nothing but a recipe for disaster? Folks - there are no electronic chads, hanging or otherwise, running the numbers from the same machine through the same machine isn't a recount, it's a rerun! and at least the scantron kinds of ballots can be confirmed by a different counting process, it could be a human or it could be a different machine but at least there's some reason to think that errors would be caught instead of just repeated.

But it's worse when you find out that the machines can be hacked to give different results while the voter is voting but the voter can't even tell it's doing something other than what he intended because there's no way to find the error or fraud when it comes time to get the total votes counted.

Give me a paper ballot or the old mechanical voting booth machines any time - something that simple is easy enough to understand so it's easy to understand what might go wrong - not like software that no one ever really sees like that Excel bug that gave the wrong answer to a simple arithmetic problem that had to get fixed by Microsoft after they had already started selling the program.

I don't know what would be worse - that the people trying to install these machines are too stupid to realize their mistake or that they're actually trying to wreck stuff on purpose.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

Related Posts:
The Straw That Turns The Camel's Stomach?