Cyberista’s audience is, in a word, global. The last thing we wanted to write about was yet another podunk Florida election gone awry.
The facts are pretty straightforward. This election was just a simple Democratic primary, with voting shenanigans occurring exclusively in South Florida. Of the 11 counties that were experimenting with high-tech voting machines, only Broward and Miami-Dade Counties could not get their elections right.
This should come as no surprise because these two areas, and South Florida in general, have been rocked by one or another election scandal since the early 1980′s. The region reeks of corruption because of year round bikini-weather and more laundered drug money than you can shake a rolled-up $100 bill at.
Rather than discussing Reno’s complacency or McBride’s remarkable dark horse victory, and rather than discussing the endemic stupidity of South Florida, we’ll instead focus on the positive outcomes of the election scandals.
It would be foolish to assume that there have been no incidences of widespread election fraud prior to the 2000 presidential election. The United States is as much of a banana republic as any other country in this hemisphere. The difference between individuals being robbed of their vote prior to the information age and now is that the information age has allowed knowledge to travel at the speed of light.
Technology does not recognize power or political favors unless the programmer decides to teach it such recognition. This must have been disconcerting to the scumbags that made careers out of giving suffrage to dead white people and stealing suffrage from live black people. The only way to toss a monkey wrench into this election was to make sure that remarkably convenient errors occurred.
No training. Paper doesn’t fit. Smudges.
While there are a lot of brain-dead people in South Florida that have yet to die, even walking carcasses can figure out how to use a touch screen. Somebody needs to go to jail for the unbelievably stupid “mistake” of incorrect paper size. As for “smudges”, we find it extremely hard to believe that none of the election officials had ever used a Palm Pilot or similar touch screen and did not offer the suggestion of using a stylus to avoid oily screens.
With each scandal, the microscope power gets 10 times greater. With each scandal, the intensity of public light gets 10 times hotter. Transparency breeds democracy and democracy, as is painfully apparent, is something that we may have never had.
We’re looking forward to it.
