Electionistic Strategery

Electronic Voting Machines in Illinois so Easy to Use, They Tell You How to Vote

By Johnny Davis ⋅ March 13, 2008 ⋅ Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

March 8th, 2008 – DuPage County, IL

Electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold (now Premier Elections Solutions) proved how much easier voting can be in the digital age. In Illinois, in the special election held to replace Dennis Hastert electronic voting machines did voters the courtesy of telling them how they should vote.

Diebold electronic voting machines in DuPage county aided voters in their decision by displaying the word “Republican” on the screen. The screen on which the word was displayed is the actual touch-screen that voters use to make their selections, which was a tremendous time-saver. It saved many voters uncounted seconds, because it allowed them to be told how to vote and to cast that vote without moving their eyes more than a few inches.

In at least one precinct, elections judges placed masking tape over the word “Republican” that appeared on the screen of the Diebold-manufactured electronic voting machines, presumably because they thought that voting had been made too easy by the labor-saving devices that Diebold had hard-coded into the electronic voting machines. The judges likely thought that having the electronic voting machines tell voters which party they should vote for took all the fun out of election day.

The non-partisan Illinois Ballot Integrity Project is concerned that having electronic voting machines displaying the word “Republican” on the same screen that voters use to cast their ballots might influence the outcome of the election. Of course it will. It will make the election easier. The electronic voting machines are designed to make voting easier – just like all machines are designed to make something easier. But IBIP doesn’t want easy elections. They want, “to inform and educate the public, media and government officials about important election-integrity issues and to promote the adoption of legislation and policies designed to secure the democratic process.”

Making the disastrous ritualized façade we call voting resemble democratic processes in any way would take enormous amounts of legislation and policies. That is not easy. That is a pain in the ass.

Diebold just wants to make things easy on us. Fortunately for lazy voters everywhere, Diebold and DuPage County Board of Elections know some slimy sleaze mongers that are using Turd Blossom Rove’s despicable tactics destroy the non-partisan IBIP. Soon, the citizen’s-action organization will be widely considered a sub-division of the Democratic Party and their interference in easy elections will be dismissible as partisan rhetoric.

Diebold did not care to comment, but we made something up anyway. “The judges shouldn’t have put tape on the touch screen voting machines,” a pretend Diebold representative commented. “It can leave gunk, and you have to get a special solvent to get it off.”

Despite early indications that easy-voting was going to be successful in Illinois, the Democratic candidate, Bill Foster won the election.