Gore Vidal Savages Electronic Voting

gribbly writes "aging author and social critic Gore Vidal savaged electronic voting in an interview with the LA Weekly. The interview deals mainly with (what's wrong with) the Bush Administration, but halfway down he says: 'We don't want an election without a paper trail...all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?'."

Comments

He's a luddite, but a sharp luddite

[Ars-Fartsica]

Vidal may be a notorious blue-blood, and clearly a luddite, but nonetheless he is the source of an incredible amount of scathing invective tracing back to The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, which somewhat dated now, is still biting.

Vidal is one of America's sharpest social critics, although he only operates as a critic. He ran for office once but I suspect he would be a failure as a career politician despite his family ties.

Time for Open Source Voting Machines

[!Squalus]

We need these things to be built upon Open and Inspectable Source and on machines that the public can trust as giving valid results. Otherwise - it is all BS. I have been calling for a Corporation for Public Software to do just this. I continue to do so.

This simply is too important to allow hacked machines to spit out as answer that somebody pre-determined in a back-room deal.

We can do something about it now, or we can pay the consequences of an untrusted election system come next year. The choices are few, the ooportunities many. Write me off as stupid if you just don't give a rat's, but you will sooner or later.

Re:How much press will it get, though?

[GMontag]

Correct, which leaves a whole lot more on the Left, like major newspapers, magazines and all the rest of the networks plus the rest of 24 hour cable news..

Paper trail for what??

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! Did it matter in the 2000 election in Florida?
The trail is still there -- is someone doing anything about it?
Bah crap! The precedent is already there. It could be the Dem party which does that the next time...
Its all the same in the end.

Re:How much press will it get, though?

[HungWeiLo]

Not quite. Time magazine recently yanked an archived article quoting Bush Sr. as basically saying that invading Iraq would not be a wise thing to do.

Re:Gore Vidal is an idiot

[ncc74656]

So you think Vidal is an idiot (debatable). What is your position then on Bush's assault on the Constitution?

I believe the correct answer to your question is mu.

Re:Just another leftist whiner

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean. The Repubd were and still sre hung up on Clinton. 3 years out of office and they are still whining about him.

The real issue here is the voting macihnes. They do not work and are not able to be audited. I heard an interview with a person who was a precinct captain. They wanted to make sure the machines were working correctly so they wanted to cast some mock votes, like they used to. She was told they could not because the system is proprietary.

Re:How much press will it get, though?

[Wah]

Did you know that 90% of the people you see on CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC news broadcasts...all of those toadies vote Democrat.

Funny how you left Fox out, since that would bring it closer to 50%. BTW, where do these numbers come from? I'd guess a conservative book about the media, but I could be wrong.

BTW, having a 'liberal' media, is a whole lot better than 'totalitarian' media. But why am I trying, chances are that 'liberal' is such a connotated and evil word for you by now that actual thought concerning its use is problematic.

Also, those are public companies you've listed. Mind telling me the political affiliation of the majority of their stockholders?

Networks

[BugMaster ChuckyD]

you mean the ones owned by giant corporations? Like general Electric for instance? G.E. being a major defence contractor is sure to hire a bunch of pacifist lefties for their news operation because that would help their bottom line, right? I mean just look at the hard in dpeth questioning Bush got during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. The liberal media was out there all the time questioning whether Iraq had WMDs and whether they had ties to terrorists etc. Not.

Re:Must be Bush's fault

[fenix down]

Well, if you just go to opensecrets.org and look it up, you could see who they were donating to while Clinton was president. Three Republican senate campaigns (Voinovich, Faricloth, Dewine) and the RNC. That's all, at least since '97 when they got involved in Deibold. None of the three he speaks of ever donated to Clinton.

We don't know either way ...

[burgburgburg]

if there are any American citizens at Gitmo. The current adminstration won't give anyone (including the Red Cross) a listing of who is there.

We do, of course, have two American citizens (Padilla and Hamdi) declared as enemy combatants kept in Naval brigs, not charged with any crimes, not allowed access to lawyers, not allowed the right to remain silent, held indefinitely by fiat of W alone. But you're right, they're not at Gitmo. They're here in the US.

Vote!!!

[ianfs]

All I can hope for is that all of the people who are yelling about how evil Bush is get out and vote next November. If every person here on Slashdot votes next year we'll get him out for good. And if the guy we vote in sucks then lets vote him out as well and keep voting them out until they get the message that THEY work for US.

Re:Well said Mr. Vidal.

[fiannaFailMan]

Excellent points all round. See also this report from Greg Palast at BBC Newsnight that shows one of the conspirators _literally_ running away when confronted by the fact that the state of Florida paid a lot of money to have a purge list from the electoral roles checked for its accuracy, but the work was not carried out.

Thousands of innocent black and latino voters were prevented from voting. Gore "lost" by less than 600 votes.

Re:Why oh why

[Usquebaugh]

There are strong parallels between early Hitler and the current Bush. I'm not saying that Bush is or is going to be as bad as Hitler. The big difference to my mind is that Hitler served in the trenches during the WWI, Bush hid in Texas during Vietnam. If you cannot see the danger in :- the new laws like the Patriot Act, treating POWs as examples, Guantanemo Bay, the use of no-bid contracts by the executive, the new people employed to spy on Americans, the increased control exerted over the military, the attempts to obilterate any dissent, the new selective service jobs, then feel free to read what Hitler was doing after his first election. I take it you have the books you so freely ask others to read? Bush got rid of two dictatorships, I assume you mean Afghanistan and Iraq. My politcal knowledge is limited but I do not think Afghanistan was a dictatorship, no single leader you see. Also, Saddam is not accounted for, his dictatorship is seemingly gone. Why did the US invade these countries? We were after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and WMD in Iraq. 100% failure so far. Silly me I was forgetting the world is rid of two dictatorships. Now I see you're anger when people compare Bush to Hitler. Hitler could plan a decent shock and awe, I mean blitzakrieg, campaign. Bush couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.

Re:gore vidal: lost all touch with reality

[MKalus]

Another absurd statement; health care in the USA is the best in the world. Oh wait, he means health care paid for by the taxpayer. There are plenty of private health insurers and hospitals are forbidden to turn away patients who cannot pay.

Though I am sure they do just what is necessary to not let you die.....

Thanks to superior medical care and a solid national defence...

Half of his time he spent in Europe tough....

Umm, what about last week's unemployment numbers down to 6 from 61? Umm, what about the stock market up significantly from the first of the year? Umm, what about corporate earnings meeting and beating expectations (which are up from last year)?

Actually those numbers, even though they look nice, don't paint an accureate picture.

Once people loose their unemployment benefits they also fall out of the statistic, so in essence it could just mean there are no further job losses, but not necessarily the creation of new ones.

Likewise, when the numbers were climbing, they were also understating.

In comparision: In Germany for example anybody who is without a job and because of this is on any kind of welfare is going to be counted in the stats, thus the numbers in Germany for example, tend to be higher.

Bush?

[110010001000]

What does this have to do with Bush? The electronic voting initiative was started under Bill Clinton.

Get your tinfoil hat ready, Gore.

Re:Vidal Opposes BushCo: +100, Patriotic

[demachina]

Here is another good read that somehow hasn't seen any mainstream media play:

http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm

The gist of it is Prescott Bush, George W's grandfather, was a business partner of the Thyssen and Flick families, who helped bankroll the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party from 1923-1942. Flick funded the S.S. and S.A. in their early years. Thyssen wrote a book "I Paid Hitler" describing his financial support for Hitler from 1923.

It is quite possible the Bush family helped make the rise of Hitler possible.

In 1942 the U.S. Government seized the assets of Union Bank, Seemless Steel and Holland American trading, all run by Prescott Bush, for the Harriman family, for being Nazi fronts which were at the time trading with the enemy. Among other things it appears Union bank was a front for Flick and the German Steel Trust which was the major manufacturer of steel and explosives for the Nazi war machine.

It kind of sounds like the Bush family were rather fond of totalitarian governments and were particularly fond of them in the 30's when the western democracies were in collapse and there was a lot of money to be made in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. They may well have endorsed the rise of Hitler as they saw it as a chance to make a lot of money banking and trading with Germany.

Re:How much press will it get, though?

[antiMStroll]

There it is again, the Saddam/9-11 link. Bush no longer maintains this fiction, it's time to drop it here too. BTW, if it was due to just the book excerpts why did Time remove the entire article and any reference to it in the table of contents (instead of, obviously, deleting just the excerpts or replacing the TOC entry with a short explanation.) I'll take off the Tin Foil Hat when you remove the Tin Foil Glasses.

Sour grapes?

[rnd()]

Gore Vidal is related (albeit distantly) to Al Gore. Doesn't this sound like sour grapes to you? Plus, he's got a new book out so he's probably going after some free publicity. The new book looks pretty good, though, I must say.